Personal computers and remote servers often are damaged by subtle anomalies that users never see, such as sags, surges, spikes, brownouts, line noise, frequency variation, switching transients and harmonic distortion. A business on typical utility power is subjected to these hidden power problems every day and complete outages several times a year. Solutions that you should implement for all such equipment include:

• Minimum - Surge suppressors address the power surges, but have no effect on the under-voltage and variance conditions that can erode equipment health over time or zap it in an instant.
• Standard - Uninterruptible Power Systems (UPSs)  protect your IT systems by conditioning incoming power to smooth out the sags and spikes that are all too common on the grid and other primary sources of power Providing ride-through power to cover for sags or short-term outages (30 – 60 minutes, typically).

Disaster Recovery Planning (DRP) is the process by which you resume business after a disruptive event.  This typically means that you can get the enterprise computers, networks, and data base operational. The event might be something huge-like an earthquake or the terrorist attacks on the World Trade Center-or something small, like malfunctioning software caused by a computer virus.

Given the human tendency to look on the bright side, many business executives are prone to ignoring "disaster recovery" because disaster seems an unlikely event. However Janco has found that over one third of all enterprises have had to activate their Disaster Plans in the last few years.

Business Continuity Planning (BCP) suggests a more comprehensive approach to making sure you can keep the enterprise going and meet it business objectives. This goes beyond the enterprise computers, networks and data bases.  However, the two terms are married under the acronym DR/BC or DRP/BCP. At any rate, Disaster Recovery Planning and/or Business Continuity Planning facilitate how a company will keep functioning after a disruptive event until its normal facilities are restored. 

Recognizing the scope of the requirements, Janco suggests that you purchase the Disaster Recovery Business Continuity Template  and the do the following:

• Conduct a business impact assessment. This involved a crossfunctional team to evaluate the business requirements and tier data based on the importance to our business operations.
• Protect data and applications. It was important to back up data frequently to ensure records are kept, so we needed to upgrade
  our backup equipment to a faster version to reduce the time it took to complete a backup cycle.
• Review power and connectivity options. We needed to add uninterrupted power supplies (UPS) and connectivity for critical servers, network connections and selected personal computers to keep the most essential applications running in case of a power outage.
• Document, test and update the disaster preparedness plan. Part of the Janco Disaster Recovery and Business Continuity Template plan needs you to include updated configuration diagrams of the hardware, software and network components to be used in the recovery. The plan also needed to include logistical details, such as travel to backup sites and spending authorization for emergency needs.
• Consider telecommunications alternatives. Often taken for granted, telecommunications backup involving redundancy and alternatives needed to be in place - and in the case of spot outages, redundancy may be enough. For larger outages, alternative communications vehicles, including wireless phones, wireless data cards and satellite phones, had to be considered.

Importance of testing is critical to the disaster recovery and business continuity planning.

All good disaster recovery and contingency plans start with having a good solid backup of data. Although systems and applications can be reinstalled and reconfigured, data cannot be rebuilt out of thin air. The key to having a good backup is to make sure the data is correct and can be successfully restored. This is not always as easy as it seems. One company had such an issue. Their backup administrator did not correctly follow procedures and when he thought he was doing a backup, he actually was not writing anything. When they tried to restore a database, they found out all the tapes were blank.

The World Health Organization has raised the pandemic alert over the spread of swine flu to phase 5.

WHO says that based on assessment of all available information and following several expert consultations raised the current level of influenza pandemic alert from phase 4 to 5.

While making the annoucement, WHO stated that all countries should immediately activate their pandemic preparedness plans. At this stage, effective and essential measures include heightened surveillance, early detection and treatment of cases, and infection control in all health facilities.

In disaster planning when a pandemic occurs the data center exists but people are in separate locations. The Disaster Planning and Business Continuity Planning processes need to make the user and business operating experience as similar as possible so that the work environment is the same in the remote site (often home) as in the office. A key requirement is to increase remote access capabilities in addition before the pandemic occurs the following planning needs to take place:

• Define necessary staff levels for critical business processes
• Identify who can work remotely and who has to be in the office
• Validation of vaccinations for key staff members
• Identify the lights out processing issues for computer operations staff
• Identify the network and remote access capacity requirements - what percent of workers do you need to be on the system for the enterprise to continue to operate
• Train and test of users and IT staffs in how to operate from remote locations Require key employees to work from remote site at least once a month
• Validate broadband capacity to remote sites (home users)
• Have copies of disaster plan available in remote site
• Put in place process for the synchronization of OS system patches and VPN updates - if the workstations are not used frequently disable the auto update features for security updates but maintain a process to see that they workstations are up-to-date.
• Define specific requirements for security and PCI-DSS when the disaster plan is activated for a pandemic.
• Define change management and version control processes to be used and how they will be controlled during the pandemic.

Getting started with a disaster recovery / business continuity plan may seem daunting, but is not. The process starts by addressing the needs of the business - not the IT department.

• Access the enterprise's operating environment - Identify critical business functions and then determine which systems, applications and data must be available to keep each function running smoothly.
• Conduct an IT business impact analysis - Develop a hierarchy of business functions and processes based on their importance to operations. You will most likely find that, although some systems need to be up and running as soon as possible after a disaster, other systems can wait.
• Establish a team with enterprise wide management experience and responsibility -  Gather representatives from across the business, from IT to human resources and facilities management. Each member should contribute to both the development of the disaster recovery plan and its execution. Be sure to define their responsibilities and the reporting hierarchy in the event of a disaster and to equip them with mobile technology, so they can make decisions spontaneously.
• Develop budgets and funding sources - A disaster recovery plan is only as effective as the resources that are committed to it. Once you have determined what it will require to support your business recovery objectives, you need to identify the tools and procedures needed to meet them. Be specific about the cost of these mechanisms, as well as the financial risk of disaster, so you can build a realistic business case.
• Define specific responsibilities and tasks - Spell out tasks, responsibilities and roles - not only to revive systems, but also to provide access to users and enable operations to continue even under compromised circumstances.
• Re-evaluate what has been created and keep it up to date - Test it, reexamine it and update it regularly - once a year, twice a year or even quarterly. Also, remember that there are continuing advancements in disaster recovery technology. Keep revisiting your options to take advantage of faster, more-cost-effective solutions.

Most companies buy servers from the likes of Dell, Hewlett-Packard, IBM, or Sun Microsystems. But Google, which has hundreds of thousands of servers and considers running them part of its core expertise, designs and builds its own. Google has designed its own servers and each server has its own 12-volt battery to supply power if there's a problem with the main source of electricity. Since 2005 Google's data centers have been composed of standard shipping containers--each with 1,160 servers and a power consumption that can reach 250 kilowatts.

A disaster or business interruption occurs, what do you do?  A quick roadmap to follow is:

• Do not panic and remain calm! When a disaster or business interruption occurs the first priority number is to ensure the safety of the employees.
• Evaluate the disaster!  Determine the impact on your personnel and enterprise operations, this evaluation the event is critical in making the decision to activate the disaster recovery business continuity procedures.
• Communicate with everyone that can be impacted! Communicate with your team, managers, affiliates, and vendors frequently. Even if there is no status to report, do not leave anyone guessing or letting them draw their own conclusions.
• Know the disaster recovery business continuity plan! Testing the Business Continuity Plan regularly helps everyone in becoming familiar with what will happen and how it will be done.
• Be decisive! Once you have determined the level of disaster and everyone is safe to operate, it is time to make the decision if you need to implement the business continuity procedures or if the downtime for recovery acceptable.
• Start the process! Start with recovering the most business critical systems first to restore business operations to a functional level. There should not be any question, which order which applications need to be restored first.
• Lock down all backups and critical documentation! The first step to the recovery is having a set of data to recover from. This could be anything from archived tape, local disk copy, and a co-location or disaster recovery data center.
• Use multiple solution paths! Assume that nothing will work and have alternatives in place  
• Reactivate normal operations! Once the systems are operational, the disaster is over and systems are repaired it is time to move the workloads back to where they were originally.

How do you create a unified Disaster Recovery Business Continuity Plan when you IT services are outsourced to multiple vendors and some of their facilities are in the same geographical area?  Some vendors are now starting to offer services that are designed to help enterprises get a converged view with which to manage and monitor their entire IT infrastructures, regardless of whether services are delivered by in-house resources or by third-party service providers.

These service providers recognize that enterprises are moving services to specialty vendors such as security providers, network providers or computing services providers, rather than to a single services provider.

Popular social networking site Facebook.com admitted on a blog post today that over the weekend, a hard drive failure led to the temporary loss of 10% to 15% of its users stored photographs.

According to the company, several drives failed at once during a routine upgrade Friday night.

"You may have noticed in the past day that some photos aren't appearing or are displaying a 'question mark' graphic when you go to view them. We're trying to fully understand what happened, since simultaneous hardware failures like this are rare,"  a Facebook engineer, stated in his blog.

Facebook said its users' photos are safe because it stores multiple copies of the data for disaster recovery and business continuity purposes, and it is working to make the photos affected by the system failure available again as soon as possible.

A hard disk drive duplicator has been released. The second generation device is a compact and portable cloning solution with blazing cloning speeds approaching 6GB/min! A full color touch screen provides an easy to use interface, and support for SATA/IDE/USB/Firewire 1394B makes the device an extremely versatile duplicator.

The hand-held unit provides the convenience of on-site as well as "on the bench" cloning. Novice users will appreciate the "wizard" function that steps them through key cloning operations. Advanced software including Clever Copy, Selective Partitions and Master Manager is included with the device. The compact, feature-rich cloning device also features support for verification of the cloned drive using an MD5 signature of target drive. The SuperSonix device is Windows Vista compatible and supports e-SATA and microSATA drives (with optional cables) as well as solid state drives.

 IT managers must make disaster planning a top priority if they are to prevent data loss and maintain business continuity in times of crisis. Unfortunately, day-to-day operations too often steal the time that IT professionals should otherwise devote to critical disaster planning and business continuity efforts. Enterprises cannot prepare for yesterday's disaster today. That is why you need Janco's Disaster Recovery and Business Continuity Template.

This comprehensive disaster and business continuity preparedness template includes: 

• Plan Introduction
• Business Impact Analysis - including a sample impact matrix
• DRP Organization Responsibilities pre and post disaster - drp checklist
• Backup Strategy for Data Centers, Departmental File Servers, Wireless Network servers, Data at Outsourced Sites, Desktops (In office and "at home"), Laptops and PDA's.
• Recovery Strategy including approach, escalation plan process and decision points
• Disaster Recovery Procedures in a check list format
• Plan Administration Process
• Technical Appendix including definition of necessary phone numbers and contact points
• Job Description for Disaster Recovery Manager (3 pages long) - entire disaster recovery team job descriptions are available.
• Work Plan to modify and implement the template.  Included is a list of deliverables for each task. (Risk Assessment and Vulnerability Assessment)