Rolling Out a Disaster Recovery Plan – A Primer

The idea that a disaster may strike you is often

very distant in our minds. Typically we think of terrible incidents like earthquake, flood or fire when the word disaster comes into our mind; but when it comes to computer data, even a power outage can lead to a disaster scenario. Now if your company is running SQL Server database instances, then your disaster planning should cover the entire gamut of possibilities that may arise, from natural disasters to even computer viruses crashing your servers. The first step for rolling out a disaster recovery plan begins with estimating the various scenarios and creating a formidable failsafe plan to deal with the situations. Also you need to understand that in case of enterprises the disaster recovery plan for your SQL Server should sync with the overall disaster recovery plans of the organization. Let’s look at some of the key aspects you need to keep in mind while rolling out a recovery plan.        

Clearly Spell Out the Recovery Plan

At the very start you need to coordinate with all stakeholders and understand the availability requirements for your data and systems. Based on the information you need to clearly spell out the recovery plan, coordinate with different departments and allocate manpower. Moreover you need to plan out the hardware resources that would be needed to implement the disaster recovery plan along with the secondary procedures that are going to come in place.

Invest in systems and relevant hardware

For ensuring complete protection against the whole range of scenarios that can crop up, you need to invest in a plethora of systems. Ensure that you have RAID 10 or above standards implemented besides going in for an offsite cloud based backup facility. Consider creating a separate mirror data center at a different geographical location and invest in creating redundancy. Moreover test restore runs need to be made and thus a dedicated test server for mounting restored data should be in place.

Allocate roles and responsibilities

In a disaster scenario, you need to clearly formulate the roles and responsibilities. Further backup resources for each function needs to be in place. For example you can have a SQL developer trained in restoring a SQL database from tape drive under a contingency scenario. In case you are looking at a 24/7 availability scenarios, you need to ensure that operations shift to a hardened facility when a disaster strikes and data in that facility can be accessed through remote applications.

Consider SQL Data Corruption while planning for data recovery

In any scenario where you are looking at restoring a SQL database from a backup, the possibility of the backup files itself getting corrupted may still exist. In such a scenario the availability of a sql recovery tool like DataNumen SQL Recovery can work as a lifesaver. Irrespective of where you have kept your backup, in an optical drive or a flash media disk, this powerful tool will bring back your lost data in most scenarios.

Author Introduction:

Alan Chen is President & Chairman of DataNumen, Inc., which is the world leader in data recovery technologies, including access recovery and sql recovery software products. For more information visit http://www.datanumen.com/