Happy Halloween, Veeamers! In the spirit of the season, we’re having some fun!
I recently participated in a video interview with Kristy Dalton, GovGirl – the topic of the discussion was how a zombie apocalypse could destroy our data center. This sounds like a tall tale, but disasters can happen to your data. Read on to see how the 3-2-1 rule and more can help your data center.
Imagine the scenario of a zombie apocalypse. The city is being overtaken by the horde, phones are ringing off the hook, it’s complete pandemonium, and all systems are down! This scenario for the IT professional definitely falls in line with the “other duties” category in the job description.
State or Local Government and Education sectors require data Availability; it is paramount to ensuring the safety of the citizens. Keeping mission-critical services running at all times is critical. Folks rely on the availability of the police, fire department and paramedics daily, making downtime completely unacceptable. Students rely on the services of the college to be online at 2 a.m. when they’re trying to submit that last paper during finals week. However, these units are truly leveraging the modern data center that’s built on virtualization, modern storage and the cloud. It is unfortunate their Availability strategies are not in lock step with the infrastructure initiatives.
Let’s take a look at how the city could have prevented this situation with slightly better preparation.
- The business continuity and disaster recovery (BCDR) industry best practices preach the rule of, 3-2-1. What exactly does this mean? See figure 1
- 3 Copies of critical data
- 2 Different types of media
- 1 Offsite
Figure 1: Illustration of 3-2-1 Rule
If the city’s IT team was properly prepared as soon as the zombie horde began their attack, IT would have been able to leverage their offsite data protection strategy by failing over to the standby resources which are outside of the attack zone. Leveraging remote resources provides the ultimate recovery time objective (RTO) allowing for systems to get back up and running quickly.
- The city is heavily virtualized and follows a virtual first strategy, but have yet to upgrade their DR strategy. Currently, the city is not making the best use of their resources and is constantly missing their backup window as well as not meeting their required recovery point objectives (RPO). These problems are only exasperated during moments of failure. If the city had been performing regular verification of their backups, the restoration process would have been known and IT could have avoided the data loss.
These are just a few steps the city could have taken to further protect their citizens. Learn more on how your Government entity can avoid the zombie horde!
