Disaster Prevention

Russ Hill

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Disaster recovery has received a lot of press since the bombing in Oklahoma City and at the World Trade Center in New York, but little has been publicized about disaster prevention. It is not likely that your business will be bombed tomorrow, but what actions are you taking to prevent the disaster lurking in your facility? Without the experience of disaster, it is nearly impossible to be aware of all the potential sources of disaster and to take measures to prevent them. The intent of this article is to raise your awareness before disaster strikes and to help you be prepared.

If you feel that your maintenance agreement specifying a four-hour or next-day response time is sufficient, ask yourself how long it would take to recover your main fileserver if all the disk drives had to be replaced. How long would it take you just to get the new drives from your vendor? Do you even have a maintenance agreement or do you handle failures on a case-by-case basis paying for parts, labor, and materials? How much money would your company lose through lost revenues and lost work? Even with a four-hour guaranteed response maintenance agreement, it can still take days to get a failed system back up and operational. At the company I work for, we had a drive fail on a server, which prompted a support call. A maintenance representative showed up within four hours of the reported failure, but it still took three days to get the system operational again.

A Complete Disaster

When the system disk drive crashed on our main server, a call went immediately to the support contractor's service hotline. Three hours later a field support engineer arrived to replace the disk drive.