Last Updated on Monday, 28 December 2009 11:44 Friday, 24 July 2009 08:37

Q: Why would we need a disaster recovery plan?

A: Of course, a disaster recovery plan covers more than business IT dependencies, but we'll only address IT here.

If you depend on any computer for the ongoing function of your business, you need a disaster recovery plan of some kind. Servers are often the focus of disaster recovery (a.k.a. business continuity) plans. The reality is that most small to medium sized businesses depend on laptop and desktop computers as much as any servers they have for day-to-day business functions, mainly because user computers have at least some specialized software installed.

A disaster recovery plan for a one person business may be as simple as a monthly full computer backup to an external drive that is stored outside of the place of business. It may also include written instructions stating how to set up a replacement computer with settings for email programs, etc, to get the business functioning as quickly as possible.

A small business with around ten to fifty employees usually has one to five servers, so the disaster recovery plan involves the recovery of the servers and key user computers. Sometimes a duplicate server will be ready either on-site or off-site, with automated backup and restore procedures for the user computers.

A medium sized business with fifty to two hundred or more employees may have one or two dozen servers and one or two data centers separate from the main office. A data center can separate server traffic from user traffic to improve speeds while virtualizing server IT infrastructure and drastically reducing costs. Such a data center or a main office server room could act as the focus of a disaster recovery of its counterpart, containing extra server equipment and the facilities necessary to minimize the downtime from a disaster.

A relatively new alternative to small and medium sized businesses for disaster recovery involves the use of virtual machines both for servers and key user computers. Normal server hardware is still used to host the server and user virtual machines, but in the event of a disaster the virtual servers and computers can be automatically restarted on server hosts that have not failed.

Using this method, disaster recovery of servers and key users can be reduced from days to hours or even minutes, depending on the situation. Other benefits from using virtual servers and computers are higher IT efficiency in meeting business needs, higher availability in case of smaller failures or changes, and elimination of all planned server downtime and associated IT night and weekend work.

Last but not least, since most server resources are only 10-15% utilized, the use of virtual servers results in higher utilization of existing server hardware, reducing future expenditures in server hardware, power, and cooling costs. Such ongoing cost savings along with disaster recovery benefits are very appealing to any small to medium sized business in today's challenging economic climate.

So, there are as many methods for small to medium sized businesses to use in disaster recovery as there are reasons. Any business sized from one to hundreds should have one. Contact us to talk about your business' disaster recovery plan and the cost saving benefits of virtual servers that can be a part of it.