What is Disaster Recovery

Your business depends on your computers. Your employees need their databases, emails, files and applications to do their jobs. Imagine that you come to work on Monday and your database server is gone. How? It doesn’t matter. Let’s say it was transported out of your datacenter by the Romulans. Or, perhaps, the sprinkler system malfunctioned, flooded your datacenter and reduces your database dserver to a steaming, shorted out pile of junk. This is one of the reasons why you need to have the best quality management system software.

That server was the key to running your business. You business is now at a standstill and the time is quickly running out. What are you going to do? You have backups all right, but you have no server. Let’s say you are smart and you had your datacenter equipment insured. Great, now you can buy replacement equipment, but how are you going to configure it? Do you remember exactly how your filesystems were laid out? Do you know how the logical volumes were configured? Do you know what your OS release and patch level were? Didn’t think so.

Before you can use your backups, you need to have a server that is configured the same way as your old server. This is where disaster recovery procedures of most companies crash and burn. Having backups is usually enough if you loose a disk or a filesystem. But if the whole box goes – you are in trouble. Don’t count on your sysadmin to remember the configuration of your servers down to the minute detail. He will have a rough idea of how the system was setup, but this is not good enough: the devil, as you know, is in the details.

Events like this while rare, they remind everyone of the undisputed significance of disaster recovery. Without well laid out disaster recovery protocols, a failure on one side of the web can have devastating effects across the internet. For any enterprise, the greatest fear in the event of a disaster is the deleterious effect the outage has on its customers. If you have recently implemented a CRM solution, how would you cope with its sudden disappearance? Thankfully, the sudden and total loss of a CRM system is not something most of us have to deal with on a regular basis. But you never know when disaster will strike. Disasters small and large can disrupt your CRM deployment, causing downtime and lost productivity. Whether you have the Best CRMs for small businesses based on Software as a Service (SaaS) or installed on your own servers, the following are essential areas to look at:

What we can do for you

To have a successful disaster recovery policy you need to have detailed and current information about the configuration of all of your servers. Gathering this type of information is a tedious process and doing this discovery process once in a while is not good enough. This information has to be collected automatically on a weekly basis. Clearly, this is not something you or your sysadmin want to do by hand.

KrazyWorks has developed an automated solution for system configuration discovery for the purposes of disaster recovery and datacenter management. We provide you with a turn-key Disaster Recovery Management (DRM) server that will reside on your internal network. Agent modules will be installed on all of your server assets. They will collect the required information on a regular basis and send it to the DRM server.

This data will be stored locally on the DRM server and made available via a Web interface. A copy of this data will be encrypted and uploaded to your offsite disaster recovery location. Should you lose a server, all your sysadmin needs to do is access the DRM server and print out the latest detail system configuration report. This information can be used to quickly build a replacement for the lost server and allow you to restore data from your backups.

Datacenter management

The DRM server hold configuration information for all of your servers. Let’s say you have several hundred servers and you need to make sure that all of them are running the same version of Java. Using the DRM server’s Web interface you run a search for the application name and it will show you a list of all servers that have this application installed. It will also show tell you which version is installed on each server, thus allowing you to quickly identify machines that need to be upgraded.

Here’s another scenario: you are rolling out a new version of Oracle on your Solaris boxes. You need to make sure all of these servers meet the minimum patch level requirements. You can used the DRM interface to select all Solaris systems and quickly identify which require additional patches. In a large enterprise environment the task of identifying OS versions, revisions and patch levels may take days or weeks to complete by hand and it may cost you hundreds of man-hours.

Datacenter consolidation

Our disaster recovery solutions can you help you with your server consolidation by providing your with up-to-date information about each server resource, complete with detailed technical information. You can quickly identify systems that would be good candidates for consolidation or virtualization. Which boxes mount filesystems from your NAS? Which boxes rely on outdated locally-attached arrays? Which systems are configured in a similar fashion and, therefore, can be consolidated?

You will be able to answer these and many other questions just by running a quick search query using the DRM Web site, saving you valuable time and safeguarding your from making costly mistakes.

Outsourcing

If your company is taking over administration of a large datacenter, one of the first steps is to discover and catalog all the assets you will be managing. This can be a daunting task, taking weeks of valuable time and eating into your profits and you definitely need the hands of an IT professionals services, These are managed IT services New York business need to succeed and will get you out of every hassle in your system.

By using our automated disaster recovery system, you will get a clear and consistent picture of your server environment. No more relying on outdated information provided by your customers.