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Modern IT systems have enabled smaller companies to successfully
compete against larger international competitors. Today, it’s not uncommon to
see a company of less than 30 employees with offices in multiple countries...
operating 24 hours per day, and 7 days per week.
Of course, this increased flexibility and reliance on
technology has also meant an increase in the costs of scheduled and unexpected
server downtime. If your servers go down, all business grinds to a halt. Your
employees sit idle, customers get upset, and long-time clients lose trust in
your company.
That’s why it’s important to have a business continuity plan
that will get you back in business in the shortest possible time.
For larger organizations, this often means setting up high availability
failover systems that continuously replicate their live servers to a secure
remote facility. In the event that their servers should go offline, all
operations will be switched over to the emergency facility without any
noticeable outage to the end-user.
Another option would be to set up a virtualized environment
where all virtual servers run resiliently across multiple physical boxes. In
the event that one host box should go down, systems will continue operating uninterrupted
until the other unit can be replaced.
The problem with both of these approaches is obviously cost.
With server rooms often costing over $1000 per square foot – not including
maintenance, power and cooling costs – these 2 options might not be practical
for smaller businesses.
But for small businesses requiring minimized downtime, there
is a cost-effective solution available if you’re willing to tolerate a very
short recovery window.
In recent years, there has been a lot of talk about
so-called “rapid recovery” online backup services such as IBM Fastback.
With a traditional cloud backup service, you would need to
download the server image and all of the latest backup copies in batch before
your company could go back online again. This might not be practical if your small
business has high uptime requirements.
With rapid recovery services, you “get random” access to
your data while the download is in progress. This means that you can start
using your server within a few minutes of starting your recovery download, and the
server can still run while the backup download is being processed. If your
system should require a file that hasn’t yet been transferred, this file will
be moved ahead in priority sequence.
And since these services back up to the cloud, there is no
need to make significant capital investments. You simply pay for system
resources as needed on a monthly basis.
Although it’s not perfect 100% uptime, it’s close enough for
many smaller businesses. And the cost-savings are significant in comparison to
other fault-tolerant systems. If your company is looking for a cost-effective way
to minimize expensive server downtime, this may be an option you’d want to
consider.
About The Author:
Storagepipe offers a range of high-availability services and online backup
software with rapid recovery capability.
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