Backing Up Business - Industry Trend or Event - Report Example

Project Management Customer’s name Tutor’s name Date Disaster recovery site This paper aims at providing the remedy for the built up of a new recovery site for the data centre which is existing at the Dubai Women’s College. The main purpose of the project is to ensure that there is business continuity during the switching process. In this process, we have to consider that the college’s data centre can only afford a downtime of fifteen minutes only. During disaster time, the Dubai Women’s College requires to ensure that there is an availability of the critical resources which are required by the students at any one time. This paper will seek to explain the current data centre and also seek to establish ways in which the improvement can be made with minimal effects to the data centre and also with respect to the maximum allowable downtime. The paper will first look into present system and the operations of the present system and the discuss ways in which data recovery as a process of disaster recovery can be established in the data centre with minimal interventions to the data centre. System overview The data centre and the whole of the Dubai women’s college use Windows operating system (Windows Vista and Windows 7) as the main operating system. The sever side uses Mac OS. There are various access policies which have been put up due to the great number of users. Internet communication is through the transmission control protocol/ internet protocol (TCP/IP). Most of the networking equipment has utilised the Cisco technology. The network has hosted the organizations website and some other intranets like portals. The applications which have been used have been outsourced. They are an integration of commercial applications like the Microsoft, SQL and an oracle database. The network supports various user services like web hosting and email messaging. The directory service in the network assumes the use of dynamic name service system. Structure of the data centre From the diagram, the data centre has a lot has back up power which is supplied by various UPS’s. Data is stored in dedicated servers within the main building. There is a control unit which is aimed at controlling the processes within the data centre. The data centre is organized into five racks each of which has dedicated systems for various storage purposes. The first rack for example has three mailboxes which are for mail storage. They have exchange servers, two active directories, DNS servers for resolution of the web URL’s associated with the network, two servers for dynamic host resolution configuration. This is a technology that allows the computers networked in the network to be configured automatically without necessarily requiring the intervention of the network administrator. It allows the computers to have unique IP addresses. The second rack contains the SQL database, application programmes and the storage area network servers. The third rack has web servers, file servers, print servers, servers for the online charging system, KVM switching (Keyboard, video and mouse) protocol and the backup. The last two racks have information about switching and IP telephony configurations. In the data centre, most of the functions are internal apart from the email service, the web service and the streamlines which should go through the firewall for safety purposes. All the servers are IBM systems. Back up is through mirroring of the servers and the use of LSO tapes which is often done. All the databases keep being backed up due to the risk of a disaster. Disaster recovery Disaster recovery is a process, set of policies and underlying procedures that help in recovery of the technological infrastructure which is very important to an organization after a disaster which can either be due to nature or due to a human imposed disaster. Recovery from the disaster is usually for the sake of business continuity and should be focussed on zero rated interruption to the system. The main focus is on the IT systems that support core functions of the business. Establishment of a disaster recovery site for the data centre An effective disaster recovery site should operate at a near 100% efficiency. This is due to the vast information that is stored in the data centre which can cost the organization quite a lot of money to put up. Before, they were taken to be expensive systems though there are various ways that the cost factor can be cut. In the Dubai Women’s college data centre, the recovery site can begin by releasing the main data centre off some burdens. This can be through removing the main back up system from the centre. In this case, there should be preset “recovery point objectives’. The computing assets should be put in such a way that the rates are utilized to the maximum possible lengths. A state where the main backup is independent of the data centre is shown below. Challenges One of the critical challenges in the design of a recovery site is business continuity. Our site has the challenge of making sure that the data centre does not surpass the 15 minutes down time which was stated before. It is almost impossible to have a recovery site with idle resources for computing. It is therefore necessary to minimize costs. Design strategy In the design and implementation phase, the following factors should be adhered to; investment in the correct equipment, achievement of very high utilization rates.. Design involves the following steps; Management engagement - > service inventory - > solutions choice and testing - > solutions implementation - > documentation - > recovery testing - > training, maintenance and further documentation. On engaging the management, the next phase of the planning lifecycle is the service inventory which requires development of the required services for implementation of the solution. All the services had definitions for the “recovery time objectives”. This is the time in which the data must have been recovered for normal resumption of business. Summary for the strategy Data centre: the data centre is in existence and has been explained at the beginning of the document Servers: the servers responsible for disaster recovery will not sit as idle computing assets as they will constantly be used to run batch jobs as the disaster is awaited Storage: 80% data is reserved in cheap SATA disks. 20% of the more crucial data is stored in fibre channel disks which are more expensive Back up: the disaster recovery back up library is used to replicate data from the main site instead of using additional backup. This will avoid the wastage of computing resources at the disaster recovery site Network: A WAN line with about 155 Mbps should be connected between the data centre and the disaster recovery site for data replication. Implementation of the disaster recovery This approach is based on; Avoidance of idle computing resources: - on calculation of servers needed to host crucial sessions of interaction, batch jobs and other servers, batch servers can be removed from the data centre to the data recovery site. In case of a disaster, these servers can be removed from the batch pool to the serve the disaster recovery purpose. Tiered storage: mechanisms for data replication should be according to the RTO and the RPO. This is put into practice by making use of a fibre channel and SATA disks. FC disks occupy about 20% of the DR capacity being in use by the I/O sessions from batch jobs. SATA disks, with 80% capacity are required interactively only during a disaster. Despite the low speed of SATA disks as compared to FC disks, they have a good throughput. Offloading of the main site back-up: offloading of the backup from the main site to the DR site helps in ascertaining that there are no idle computing elements. In disaster recovery, data is replicated on a day to day basis to the DR site. Due to this the data which is replicated at the DR site is used for backup. With these strategies put in place, areal disaster recovery scenario can come forth with a very good percentage of success. Utilization of the server is enhanced by making sure that disaster recovery values for the computing assets is maximized through the use of high rates of utilization. Challenges and probable opportunities The process of creating a disaster recovery site is something that is always in progress. It is always wise to keep up to the mark with technology to enhance that the project is always at the latest advanced stages. Processes for data and service provisioning should always be streamlined. This will act to make sure that the data and any other critical services are always available at the disaster recovery site. Obsolete services and data should have a systematic way of removal to avoid wasting the much needed space. Data replication should be monitored in a very strict manner. If data fails to be copied to the disaster recovery site, there is a probability of risk in provision of adequate response during disaster recovery. This can also have other impacts like inability to recover data which is n the tapes considering that the production data is backed up using the disaster recovery back up data. This disaster recovery plan can be used in different organizational settings; Teams which are responsible fro development of software in most cases have the same integration environment as well as environments for production computing. In case of a disaster in such a site, the integration team can be moved to the disaster recovery site. In this way the integration environment is converted to one for production. Conclusion The disaster recovery site implementation discussed in the paper is a low cost model which can be implemented at the Dubai Women’s College. The method of data replication used has made the site to be very efficient and in case of a disaster the required RTO and RPO are maintained at the required levels with over 90% guarantee. This is an efficient method which will make the process a success (Hoffer, 2001). References Hoffer, J. (2001). "Backing Up Business - Industry Trend or Event." Health Management Technology. Read More