Chapter 11. Disaster Recovery

Disaster recovery, by its very name , implies a very critical component of any corporate computing environment. The literal lifeblood of a company is its electronic data, including accounts and passwords that access that data. Yet in my experience in customer support, the recovery of that data is seldom planned and rarely tested until a crisis occurs and you can't recover it. Of course, those who we work with are those who have failed to do the testing or planning ”the successful ones never call. However, I've seen enough failures to frighten me at how little regard seems to be paid to this important issue.

In the development of the migration plan, make sure you plan for disaster recovery. This is a complex issue because disaster recovery contains many facets, including

• Hardware failure, including servers, disk drives , power outages.

• Network outages.

• Software failures.

• Application data corruption (Exchange, Structured Query Language [SQL], and so on).

• Operating system (OS) crash.

• Document loss, such as user files, confidential and sensitive documents, and documents on network shares.

• Human error.

• Accidental deletion of objects.

• Failure to monitor errors and warnings resulting in more serious hardware, software, or network failure.

• Active Directory (AD): Domain Controller, Global Catalog Server, AD Objects. This could be a single user, a group , a computer, a domain, or an entire forest.

• Natural or man-made disasters.

Of course, losing your AD data or access to it means loss of security principals and potentially the entire directory service infrastructure.

This chapter will help you develop a disaster recovery plan, and identify specific details of AD recovery as well as ProLiant- related issues. Details for disaster recovery of applications depends on each application, so this topic is not detailed here. Exchange disaster recovery is covered in Chapter 12, "Migrating to Exchange 2003," and disaster recovery tools and procedures for clusters are covered in Chapter 13, "High Availability in Windows Server 2003."

note

To help you develop the disaster recovery plan and for some good practical advice, I have provided a case study from an HP customer in Italy detailing that customer's disaster recovery plan. This was provided by HP consultant Maria Isa and is available for download on this book's Web site at http://www.phptr.com/title/0131467581.