Plan for System Outages

Performing regular backups and Disaster Recovery Planning is critical to any organization. If a system is to crash and unable to be recovered, how will the organization recover if all the data is corrupt or inaccessible? Setting up your server with the correct storage media can be critical to your network’s performance. Purchasing a high powered truly redundancy hot swappable server which will have almost a guaranteed 100% uptime.  A Redundant Array of Independent Disks is known as a RAID. A RAID 50 server will have a capacity of 12600GB with a read gain of 14x. One disk from each RAID 5 set can fail without data loss. A RAID 50 is a RAID 5 + RAID 0, a mirror of block-level stripes with parity. The fault tolerance and benchmark provides better throughput and latency than that of other RAIDS except RAID 0. The theoretical fault tolerance is d-1 per span meaning the RAID 10 can lose up to a total of stripes * (d-1) drives where d is the number of drivers per span. Having a RAID 50 server will almost guarantee an uptime of 100%. With regular schedules backups stored off site and incremental backups also stored off site, the data of the organization is guaranteed to be recoverable to the latest backup. A Disaster Recovery plan will be, in quick summary, to practice a crash. To do this, the data will need to be restored to an offsite server, the network traffic will need to be redirected to the offsite server, and normal operations will need to be resumed.