Here are a few ideas of what an ideal world from the disaster recovery perspective would be like. In an ideal world, there would be no need to marry technology with rigid cost or functionality requirements. Doing disaster recovery right from the get-go is the only concern. It may be a little unrealistic but here is what the perfect IT environment from a disaster recovery point of view might be like.

Scalability and Transparency

With all systems designed with disaster recovery in mind, scalability and network transparency would be of primary concern. Transition would then be an administrator’s dream. Storage, data recovery, networking and system access would not have any base around some form of backwards compatibility nor would it be “mainly compliant”.

Subnetting schema for data center components would deliver availability across multiple locations without the need to rely upon external components. There would be no need to depend on other departments for data center redundancy or networking components for connectivity. All your data would be in the appropriate locations including off-site backup repositories.

Storage would become of paramount influence. Multiplicity of redundant systems both on-site and off-site would ensure availability 24/7.

100% Disaster Recovery Compatibility Policy

In our ideal world, the disaster recovery policy would force compliance throughout the network. Upgrade if necessary to ensure that all components blend. Then should the unthinkable happen recovery would require little thought. Everything would recovery perfectly because of your 100% disaster recovery compatibility policy. Immediately replace any incompatible assets or services with ones that are.

Rapid Conversion

Our disaster recovery would be executable in a few steps per system or better yet a few steps for the entire network. With such a readily implementable disaster recovery process, there would be no angst in scheduling and running trials or practice sessions.

The entire disaster recovery team and probably the entire IT team could fly into action. Then in just a few short steps, the whole disaster recovery process would be underway. Without the compatibility issues verification of restoration processes would no longer be the throat in the mouth experience we so often encounter.

Data Recovery Unification

The data recovery process would be less of a nightmare since we would not be using a multitude of patches and scripts to fill the holes of elements that are not fully compliant with the entire disaster recovery system and its processes.

Remote Recovery Center Performance

One of the biggest issues facing any administrator is the performance related characteristics of the remote data recovery center. In our ideal world we would ensure that the remote center was fully capable of meeting the fully inventory capabilities of the primary data center. We would certainly be making use of such technologies as Blade computing and 10G Ethernet over copper of fiber optic media.

Naming Structures

DNS naming changes wrought by changeover to our failover systems may need clients systems to reboot in order to clear naming caches of now incorrect data.

Then again, with the failover systems incorporated into the DFS as “hot” redundant units this may not be necessary. The idea here is to have the datacenter and failover systems operating more along the lines of a PC using a mirrored and striped array of hard drives. Its just the scale would be much larger.

Remember that we have our 10G fiber optic network infrastructure and Blade centers incorporating built-in hot swap redundant elements and enclosure supported high speed interconnects.

Virtualization

Here is another tool that the ultimate disaster recovery center of our dreams would make use of in more than just storage and data server economic trade-off capacities.

Resource Rationalization

The best bit is that the bean counters would no longer be on your back concerning resource rationalization and the fly by the skin of their teeth management priding themselves on their rational “calculated” risk taking capacity would no longer be fighting your every budgetary requirement tooth and nail. Peace of mind in IT would be the prize we could take for granted rather than dream of here in the real world.

Documentation Simplification

With our silky smooth disaster recovery procedures, the associated documentation processes become considerably more streamlined. Creating the disaster recovery and the failover documentation would be dramatically more of a no-brainer. You may even consider entrusting some of your junior IT staff (with the appropriate supervision of course) to contribute to what is now usually a complex multidepartment nightmare.

Just dream on all this is courtesy of our 100% disaster recovery compliant systems. So much for the lunch break its back off to the grind I go. Until next time, enjoy!