What's on Your 2016 BDR Planning Checklist?
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We're making a list - hope you're checking it twice!Before you take a break and relax for the holidays, don't leave your clients hanging like stockings on the hearth. As the New Year approaches, be proactive and use this time to reconnect with clients about their backup and disaster recovery (BDR) needs. The last thing you want while you're away is to field a frantic call from an important customer complaining that a server went down, preventing them from accessing key data. While you're at it, get a jumpstart on 2016 BDR sales by analyzing your current portfolio of clients and identifying new opportunities.
In order to help you close out Q4 and prepare for the coming year, we've compiled a checklist of BDR action items that are sure to land you on your clients' "nice" list, but we want to know what you're doing to prepare for the New Year!
Have you scheduled backup tests and revisited your DR plans with clients? Have you set goals for BDR adoption in 2016? Sound off!
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A large customer of ours was trying to backup roughly 5.5TB of local data on a Unitrends appliance rated for 3.2TB, up until a couple weeks ago. We just got them a new, larger unit to give them a total of over 10TB of data protection, but they still did not have a DR plan. Small WAN pipe, remote location, and lack of wanting anything hands-on (carrying drives off-site) determined our limited options. We decided to go with an Iosafe 1515+ NAS for a local backup copy. It's not ironclad, but it's as good as we can do for now, given the limitations we have to deal with. That should arrive before the end of the year, but that will be our first DR project of 2016, getting it installed and operational.
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@art_of_shred said:
We decided to go with an Iosafe 1515+ NAS for a local backup copy. It's not ironclad, but it's as good as we can do for now, given the limitations we have to deal with. That should arrive before the end of the year, but that will be our first DR project of 2016, getting it installed and operational.
The thing that confuses me is that the backup is local, which goes against 3-2-1 backup rule, proved as best practices by a lot of admins
https://knowledgebase.starwindsoftware.com/explanation/the-3-2-1-backup-rule/
So basically if the primary location will suffer from rats or cockroaches (I had few customers with such experience
), then you`ll stay with no data and a lot of insects. -
@original_anvil They don't have the bandwidth to replicate over WAN, and they refuse to rely on a person carrying drives home. Ergo, the only viable option is to have something as protected as possible that lives on the LAN. The Iosafe is fire and waterproof. I don't think that a sudden overnight infestation of malicious cockroaches eating all the data on all of the servers, plus the backups and copies of the backups is quite as imperative to guard against. I think they're willing to risk that one.
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@art_of_shred said:
@original_anvil They don't have the bandwidth to replicate over WAN, and they refuse to rely on a person carrying drives home. Ergo, the only viable option is to have something as protected as possible that lives on the LAN. The Iosafe is fire and waterproof. I don't think that a sudden overnight infestation of malicious cockroaches eating all the data on all of the servers, plus the backups and copies of the backups is quite as imperative to guard against. I think they're willing to risk that one.
Well, OK. Let them live on the edge
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It's far better than the nothing they have at the moment. As they continue to grow, I'm sure it will become more critical and a more robust solution will be viable for them.
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@art_of_shred said:
It's far better than the nothing they have at the moment. As they continue to grow, I'm sure it will become more critical and a more robust solution will be viable for them.
What is the daily change rate of the data? Sure it make take 6 months to actually finally get it replicated to an off site place... but once they are there, the incrementals shouldn't take quite so long, right?
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I monitored daily backups for a couple of weeks and saw an average of roughly 120GB per day. That turns into a 12mbps load around the clock. For a rurally located business, with a 15mbps WAN link, that's just not feasible.
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@art_of_shred said:
It's far better than the nothing they have at the moment. As they continue to grow, I'm sure it will become more critical and a more robust solution will be viable for them.
And they are a manufacturing firm, their needs for DR when the main site has been destroyed are minimal. In a situation where the complete site is destroyed including the servers, the backups and the fire/water proof secondary backup system they are probably not primarily concerned with the data.
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They certainly cannot afford total loss of data, but if a nuke goes off in the backyard and takes out everything... they will have bigger fish to fry.
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You know a one time or annual or ad hoc offsite backup might be an option.
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@scottalanmiller How big of a drive can you toss into an eSATA connected drive dock?
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@art_of_shred said:
@scottalanmiller How big of a drive can you toss into an eSATA connected drive dock?
8TB currently.
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@scottalanmiller That's big enough for a single volume that holds a copy of everything. Good thinking. Taking a once per ____ copy and stashing it wouldn't be a huge deal, but it would add a tertiary layer of DR protection.
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That's what i was thinking. Even if it was ad hoc and just done by the ITSP manually and might be months old, it would mean that in case of total site destruction that at least the basic company data could be recovered from a few months back.
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@scottalanmiller Maybe I could convince them that doing a once a month copy was not enough of a hassle to outweigh its value.
