Restoration and Recovery Plan: Ceramic Manufacturing Company - Case Study Example

Running head: Restoration & Recovery Plan Restoration & Recovery Plan XXXXXXXXXXX XXXXXXXXXXXXX XXXXXXXXX June 19, 2009 Introduction: Almost all companies irrespective of their size and business domain have deployed sophisticated Information System in their organizational infrastructure to achieve operational efficiencies and to streamline the processes associated with day to day working. The evolution of Information System has come a long way, since an almost ad-hoc approach in their deployment of yore days to their current sophisticated, managed, planned and well -engineered approach. ("Introduction", n.d.) Infact so essential is their role in the success of Organization that their break-down or failure even for a second can jeopardize the entire business of the Organization. Contingency Management is one essential element in the planning of the Information System .A well designed contingency plan can go in long way to avoid data loss due to outage or any other kind of attack or failure of the Information System. In this paper an attempt is made to understand the Restoration and recovery plan employed by an organization in case of any of an attack or failure of its Information System and also to investigate how the organization manages the scenarios that involve alteration, deletion or destruction of data. The organization chosen for the study of the subject is a Ceramic manufacturing company with roughly 1300 employees. Information System: The organization has deployed an in-house web based ERP system that's essentially serves to integrate its Accounts, HR, Payroll, Inventory & Stores, Commercial Department, Sales, and Fixed Asset wings. The ERP application is deployed on Oracle Application Server with Apache web server. The company has twenty nodal offices spread across the city , all nodal offices are connected in a ring topology through fiber as well as through ISDN lines in order to maintain a 24x7 availability . The nature of work is essentially online transactional processing but owing to the integration of Inventory, it also has data warehousing application. All the twenty sites are centrally managed. A centralized Oracle 10g database hosts the data .The database is ported on two IBM p-series 570 H servers . . The operating system is IBM's AIX -5 L versions 5.3. The storage used is IBM's Fast T-700 storage. High Availability Set-up : The two IBM AIX servers are clustered through IBM's High Availability Cluster Multi Processing (HACMP) version 5.3 . The cluster is operating in cascade mode. In case one node fails due to failure or any kind of attack than the other node detects such a collapse and takes over the entire work load and consequently within four minutes, the business operations are restored. HACMP has emerged as one of the most successful high availability software that provides data protection in case of server failover through multi-connects between the servers to a shared storage through clustering software ("The Benefits", n.d.) Data Protection : The data is stored in IBM's Fast T 700 storage . Redundant Array of Independent Disks (RAID) 1+0 is implemented to optimize the storage for fault tolerance. It provides disk mirroring that duplicates the data between the two disks. So that if one disk gets corrupt or develops any fault than the lost data can be retrieved through its mirrored copy. Such a mirrored configuration also optimizes the performance through striping the data across the mirrored disks. ("RAID 10 overview", n.d.). Data Backups : The data backups constitute the most important part of the IT policy of a company. The data-backups ensure recovery of essential data whenever there is any kind of data loss by way of any file corruption, data stealing or manual transactional error. There are many options available to back-up and recover the data .Almost all the companies employ two procedures to backup the data , hot backup and cold backup .Both these techniques come in handy to retrieve the data whenever there is a loss of data. Hot backup: Twice during the day a complete export backup of the database is taken. This is taken when the database is up and running. Export is a backup utility provided by Oracle to take a online copy of the original data. The database copy includes all the information required to recreate the lost information, like control file, archive file and other database structures. In case of data loss, a Database Administrator (DBA) can easily retrieve the lost information from the backups using the import utility which retrieves the lost information. In addition to this the database is run in the archive log mode so that DBA can restore the database to any point in time configuration. ("Oracle Backup", n.d.).The backups are stored on Tape media and duplicate copies of them are kept at two locations to ensure data restore in cases where the tape gets stolen or gets corrupted. Cold backup : To restore the data from export backup , a DBA needs to create the exact replica of the lost database .Sometimes this is not possible ,in such cases cold backups can be used by DBA to recover the lost data. Cold backup is the physical copy of the actual files and when there is a complete loss of database along with its structure, than cold backup can be used to retrieve the data. The cold backups are taken weekly on a tape media and as with export backup, two copies of the same are stored at two different locations to maintain redundancy. Application Backup: The backup of source code of the application is also taken on daily basis, to ensure that backups are consistent with the current state of the application code. Operating System backups: Full backup of the Servers are taken on weekly basis after securing two hour maintenance down time window. During this time, the operations of the server are taken up by the secondary node and vice-versa. Disaster Recovery Site : Disaster recovery protects a business by helping it to respond to disruptive events that can sabotage the entire business set-up of the organization. The company has deployed and implemented a state of art disaster recovery plan to protect the company from any outage .For this company has used IBM's famous Point to point remote copy (PPRC) asynchronous to provide a consistent data recovery at the remote site. The technology is so efficient that even in case of highly critical situations like flood and fire; the IT operations can be resumed from a distant remote site in split of a second. ("Using Asynchronous", n.d.) Scenarios Some specific data loss situations and organization's preparedness to overcome these are presented as follows: Data Altered Erroneously: If a user inadvertently performs a wrong transaction, than that transaction can be rolled back by the DBA through the retrieval of prior data from the archived redolog as the database is running in the archive log mode. Data Destroyed : If the data is lost then DBA can recover it from the export backup that is taken twice during the day. Data Stolen : The data stolen can be retrieved either from the cold backups or the export backups. In order to avoid the loss of media, duplicate copies of the backups are stored at remote locations to avoid a complete loss of information. Attack/Outage The servers are running in clustered mode so that if one server fails than other server takes over the operations of the other server. In the same way if the entire infrastructure is lost due to a mishap or accident than the normal IT operations are resumed by the disaster recovery site. Strengths : The company has invested wisely in the Business Contingency Plan, in order to avert any data loss . The policy includes both logical and physical backups so that all kind of data loss scenarios can be addresses .In order to avoid any data loss due to media corruption, the copies of backup are kept at two remote locations. In addition to this, the Disaster Recovery Site is an exact replica of the primary site and is capable to resume all the business operations in case of failure of primary site. All the backups are consistent with the current state of the data. All the backup and recovery software's are well managed and updated on routine basis for recent updates and versions. All the employees and users are trained to deal with crisis and monthly backup recovery exercise is performed to ensure that staff is trained to handle any contingency. Conclusion Crisis Management is one of the most critical aspects of the IT policy and hence Administrators and managers should pay adequate attention to this to formulate an efficient and foolproof crisis management plan. Restoration & Recovery Plan The introduction, which is not labeled, begins here (don't forget to delete this text) Method Participants Apparatus Procedure References Introduction to Information Systems in Business. (n.d.). Retrieved June 18, 2009, from http://www.comp.glam.ac.uk/pages/staff/tdhutchings/chapter1.html#head2 The Benefits of AIX Data Replication in HACMP. (n.d.). Retrieved June 18, 2009, from http://www.infoworld.com/d/data-management/wp/benefits-aix-data-replication-in-hacmp-996 RAID 10 overview. (n.d.). Retrieved June 19, 2009, from http://publib.boulder.ibm.com/infocenter/dsichelp/ds6000ic/index.jsptopic=/com.ibm.storage.smric.help.doc/f2d_raid-10implementation_1tkkta.html Oracle Backup : An introduction. (n.d.). Retrieved June 18, 2009, from http://www.databasedesign-resource.com/oracle-backup.html References Using Asynchronous PPRC (Global Mirror) for Failover on zSeries. (n.d.). Retrieved June 18, 2009, from http://www.redbooks.ibm.com/abstracts/tips0420.htmlOpen Read More