June 27, 2009 at 1:29 pm
Comments posted to this topic are about the item Disaster Recovery - An Afterthought?
June 28, 2009 at 12:19 pm
When it comes to DR and internet focused technology staff, I’ve seen few who really understand the importance of recovery. Just take a look at the use of MySQL - it has a terrible recovery model, but there are countless many who swear by it - It’s not SQL Server. I find that many people do not want to spend time worrying about something that might never be needed. Until it is too late - Same with any other kind of backups.
Case in point - just look at how few people have even bothered to comment!
The more you are prepared, the less you need it.
June 29, 2009 at 12:18 am
You only know what your insurence pollicy is worth, the first time you need to call for its couverage !
In case of sqlserver, you can challange your DRP before you actually have a live issue, so you better test it !
Maybe Steve can query the forum db(s), for the test "I've lost my db" , "My server crashed and I have no backup", "deleted mdb file", "ldf file drive lost", ...
Just to give an impression of how frequent this kind of stuff occurs "publically".
Johan
Learn to play, play to learn !
Dont drive faster than your guardian angel can fly ...
but keeping both feet on the ground wont get you anywhere :w00t:
- How to post Performance Problems
- How to post data/code to get the best help[/url]
- How to prevent a sore throat after hours of presenting ppt
press F1 for solution, press shift+F1 for urgent solution 😀
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June 29, 2009 at 4:51 am
Disaster recovery? What's that?
I'm almost ready to stop asking if people have backups when they post corruption questions. It's a waste of time.
Gail Shaw
Microsoft Certified Master: SQL Server, MVP, M.Sc (Comp Sci)
SQL In The Wild: Discussions on DB performance with occasional diversions into recoverability
June 29, 2009 at 6:49 am
I've taken over DBA duties twice now, at two different companies. Both had backup plans in place. Neither had ever tested them. Both were backing up to the same media as the data and log files. Neither was cleaning up old backups correctly and were having drive space issues.
And backups are just the start of disaster recovery. NONE of the rest had been done.
I think "disaster recovery" needs to be renamed to "disaster prevention". It's not a disaster if you can easily recover from it. In that case, it's merely an emergency.
- Gus "GSquared", RSVP, OODA, MAP, NMVP, FAQ, SAT, SQL, DNA, RNA, UOI, IOU, AM, PM, AD, BC, BCE, USA, UN, CF, ROFL, LOL, ETC
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June 29, 2009 at 7:30 am
No offense to anyone intended, but to me the title of this editorial was misleading. Disaster Recovery is a concept bigger than just having proper backup/recovery processes in place to handle mistakes or simple server or cluster failures. Disaster Recovery is more about the second level of "backups" if you will. The premise of Disaster Recovery typically is that an entire data center is non-functional for whatever reason, and you need to have alternate available resources to be able to take on the data storage and processing load that the regular production servers were handling.
While I agree that you typically need to have your first level of failover or recovery processes in place to handle the basics before you even think about Disaster Recovery, the fact that the editorial doesn't even mention the possibility of the entire data center being unavailable shows how much of an afterthought Disaster Recovery has become, and how its meaning is watered down. While it may not be as important for every company to worry about having redundancy in multiple physical locations, there are many companies that should be concerned about this who aren't.
June 29, 2009 at 7:59 am
Chris Harshman (6/29/2009)
No offense to anyone intended, but to me the title of this editorial was misleading. Disaster Recovery is a concept bigger than just having proper backup/recovery processes in place to handle mistakes or simple server or cluster failures.
True, but if people don't even have backups, what's the chance that they have anything?
Gail Shaw
Microsoft Certified Master: SQL Server, MVP, M.Sc (Comp Sci)
SQL In The Wild: Discussions on DB performance with occasional diversions into recoverability
June 29, 2009 at 12:49 pm
GilaMonster (6/29/2009)
Chris Harshman (6/29/2009)
No offense to anyone intended, but to me the title of this editorial was misleading. Disaster Recovery is a concept bigger than just having proper backup/recovery processes in place to handle mistakes or simple server or cluster failures.True, but if people don't even have backups, what's the chance that they have anything?
Absolutely true. That said - when the backups are stored on top of the server they back up and you have a server overheat.... (Inject your own disaster scenario here)
Once you get past the first AND second doors, you really are talking about a reasonably small amount of groups. Pretty scary actually.
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Your lack of planning does not constitute an emergency on my part...unless you're my manager...or a director and above...or a really loud-spoken end-user..All right - what was my emergency again?
June 29, 2009 at 11:33 pm
Oh indeed....
One of our devs was astonished his server didn't work after a 380V overload (it should be 220V and due to an electrical mishap the cerquit got an overload boost).
You can immaging what happened to that server.
He tought his RAID1 disks were enough for failsafe mechanisme :w00t::w00t::hehe:
It took a couple of days and $$ to get that system to its new ruining state.
If he would have followed our advise, his downtime would have been maximum a couple of hours.
Johan
Learn to play, play to learn !
Dont drive faster than your guardian angel can fly ...
but keeping both feet on the ground wont get you anywhere :w00t:
- How to post Performance Problems
- How to post data/code to get the best help[/url]
- How to prevent a sore throat after hours of presenting ppt
press F1 for solution, press shift+F1 for urgent solution 😀
Need a bit of Powershell? How about this
Who am I ? Sometimes this is me but most of the time this is me
June 30, 2009 at 5:47 am
A disaster encompasses many things, not just losing a data center. A disaster can be someone deleting a single table (or even row), coffee spilled on a server, all the way to a major disaster like a hurricane that removes your data center.
I've seen plenty of people focus on the big disasters and then not be able to handle small ones. It's all levels of disaster recovery that need to be handled, but IMHO, the small ones, the deletes, the corruptions, are where you have to start. They are way, way more likely than your entire data center being down.
June 30, 2009 at 7:21 am
Steve Jones - Editor (6/30/2009)
A disaster encompasses many things, not just losing a data center. A disaster can be someone deleting a single table (or even row), coffee spilled on a server...
All I was trying to say is those items are not Disaster Recovery, but basic recovery. I agree again with those that say if you don't have basic recovery and failover than planning for Disaster Recovery is pretty futile, but in addition we shouldn't talk about basic faults as being disasters. The more meanings that people give to this specific concept, then people who don't already understand it will be less able to, or get the wrong idea.
It's like trying to understand the concept of "cloud computing". It seems every vendor and every article seems to have a different take on what that means. I was just trying to clarify what the long held understanding of Disaster Recovery is for those who might be confused reading these forums.
June 30, 2009 at 7:29 am
I'm not sure I agree they're basic recovery. To me basic recovery is just restoring a database. The "why" gets into when it's a disaster.
Your point is well taken, that having different meanings confuses the issue. Disasters are based on your experience. A deleted table at Amazon or Dell likely is a disaster since every minute of downtime is thousands of hard dollars. At another company, it might be an inconvenience.
June 30, 2009 at 7:33 am
"Disaster" is always subjective.
- Gus "GSquared", RSVP, OODA, MAP, NMVP, FAQ, SAT, SQL, DNA, RNA, UOI, IOU, AM, PM, AD, BC, BCE, USA, UN, CF, ROFL, LOL, ETC
Property of The Thread
"Nobody knows the age of the human race, but everyone agrees it's old enough to know better." - Anon
June 30, 2009 at 7:37 am
Chris,
I just hope people don't get scared to start small, if you hit them with "armagedon" :hehe:
Don't present a dam breakage scenario for those that need to seal up a pipe.
It may just be to overwelming !
Johan
Learn to play, play to learn !
Dont drive faster than your guardian angel can fly ...
but keeping both feet on the ground wont get you anywhere :w00t:
- How to post Performance Problems
- How to post data/code to get the best help[/url]
- How to prevent a sore throat after hours of presenting ppt
press F1 for solution, press shift+F1 for urgent solution 😀
Need a bit of Powershell? How about this
Who am I ? Sometimes this is me but most of the time this is me
July 1, 2009 at 2:29 am
Whether you call it disaster recovery or basic recovery doesn't matter. What matters is that you have it in place. You need to make sure that backups is in place and tested so that you will not sit with a backup that is corrupt or does not work when disaster strikes. Like Steve says, does not matter whether your data centre was blown away or whether a table or data was deleted, you still need a recovery plan.:blush::sick:
:-PManie Verster
Developer
Johannesburg
South Africa
I can do all things through Christ who strengthens me. - Holy Bible
I am a man of fixed and unbending principles, the first of which is to be flexible at all times. - Everett Mckinley Dirkson (Well, I am trying. - Manie Verster)
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