Introduction

The protection and data recovery is the fourth of the capacity of main infrastructure optimization. The following table includes the high-level challenges, applicable solutions and the advantages of adopting the standardized level of protection and data recovery

The standardized level of infrastructure optimization model addresses the key areas of data protection and recovery; including the services of backup and restore for critical servers. This requires that the organization has procedures and tools to manage backups and recovery of critical data on servers.

Requirement: Definition of backup and restore for critical servers

Read this section if you do not have a backup and restoration for 80% or more of the critical servers.

Introduction

IT backup and recovery is the cornerstone of data protection strategy to help organizations meet their requirements for availability and accessibility of data. Storage, restoration and recovery operations are key to storage management that involves one of the most important business assets: corporate data.

To ensure high availability through replication of critical information, data centers can use redundant components and fault tolerance technologies such as server clusters, reflecting the creation of software and hardware. However, these technologies alone can not solve problems caused by damage or removal of data, which may be due to user errors, breaches of security, viruses or errors in the application.

There might also be a requirement to retain information in a file for auditing and legal industry. This requirement may be extended to transaction data, documents and information collaboration such as email. Therefore, you must have a data protection strategy that includes a complete schedule of backup and recovery to protect data of all kinds of unexpected disruptions or disasters, or to meet the requirements of the sector in terms of data retention.

The following guidance is based on the implementation guides Services backup and recovery of the reference architecture of Windows Server.

Phase 1: Assessment

The evaluation phase examines the need to respect corporate backups and restoration, and inventory processes backup and recovery are currently available. Active backup ensures that data is properly stored and made available for the restoration according to business requirements. Any design of backup and recovery must consider the business requirements and environment of its operations.

Phase 2: Identification

The purpose of the identification phase of the solution to backup and recovery is to identify the target data repositories and prioritize the critical nature of the data. The critical data needed to support the business operations and comply with laws or regulations. The solutions of this kind must be predictable, reliable and be able to comply with the regulations and process the data in the shortest possible time.

Among the challenges they face in managing data include:

     * Manage growth in the volumes of data.
     * Manage the storage infrastructure to improve the quality of service (QoS) defined in the contractual service level (SLA) while reducing complexity and controlling costs.
     * Integrate applications with requirements for storing and managing data.
     * Operate with short or no windows backup data.
     * Admit IT systems in place that can not run the latest technologies.
     * Managing technological islands that have a decentralized administration.
     * Analyze the value of data in order to implement the most appropriate strategies for each type of data.

Although the backup and restore of all data of the organization are important, this topic discusses the guidelines and procedures for backup and restoration to be implemented for critical services in order to pass from the baseline level standardization.

Phase 3: Evaluation and Planning

At the stage of assessment and planning you must take into account several aspects of the data to determine the appropriate solution for backup and recovery for your organization. These requirements may include:

     * Amount of data that will be stored.
     * Forecasts for growth of data.
     * Performance of the process of backup and restore.
     * The need for backup and restore of the database.
     * Requirements for email backup.
     * Tables for backups and restores.
     * Requirements of data files (external storage).
     * Identifying restrictions.
     * Selection and purchase of storage infrastructure components.
     * Management plan and monitoring of storage.
     * Strategy testing and backup.

You should consider the following factors when developing a backup and recovery for critical servers:

     * Backup Mode
     *Type of backup
     * Backup topology
     * Service Plan

Data Protection Manager (DPM) is an implementation of Microsoft server software that enables the protection and recovery of data on disk for file servers in your network. Guide planning and distribution of DPM contains comprehensive information about configuring the backup plan and recovery.

Backup Modes

The backup mode determines how it will be backed up for the data to be stored. There are two ways to backup:

     * Online backups are performed while users are accessing data.
     * Offline backups are performed on the data when users no longer have access.

Types of Backups

You can use several types of backup, both online and offline. The requirement for recovery time, the period for backup and contract service level determines the method or combination of methods that are appropriate for each environment.

     * Full backup: capture all the files from all disks.
     * Incremental backup: capture the files added or modified since the last incremental backup.
     * Differential backup: capture the files added or modified since the last full backup.

Backup Topology

Originally, the only type of storage technology to backup hard drive was connected directly to the storage adapters in servers. Today, this type of storage is known as direct-attached storage or DAS. The picture of backup and recovery has changed considerably with the development of technologies such as storage area network (SAN, Storage Area Network) and provide network-attached storage (NAS, Network Attached Storage). In particular, the SAN environments offer outstanding opportunities to optimize and simplify these processes.

     * Backup and recovery server (DAS). Each server is connected to its own backup device.
     * Backup and Recovery LAN (NAS). This is a multi-tier architecture in which some servers backup jobs and start collecting metadata about data backup (also known as control data), while other servers (designated as media servers) carry out the actual work of managing data backup.

Service Plan

When designing the service backup and recovery you must consider many factors. Some factors to consider are:

     * Priorities backup and quick recovery, recovery time objective (RTO, Recovery Time Objective).
     * The frequency with which data changes.
     * Time restrictions on the backup operations.
     * Storage media.
     * Requirements for data retention.
     * Timeliness of data recovered, recovery point objective (RPO, Recovery Point Objective).

Recovery Plan

Without a recovery plan, even the best backup plan may be ineffective. The following are some of the practices that make up a good data recovery plan.

Verify the backups

Verification of backups is a critical step in disaster recovery. You can not retrieve data unless you have a valid backup.

Back up the existing log files before performing a restore

Good protection is to back up the existing log files before restoring a server. If data is lost or accidentally restores a backup set that is older, the registry helps to retrieve information.

Conduct periodic fire drills

Create a test environment and try to complete recovery of data. Be sure to use the backup data for production and record how long it takes to recover data. This includes the retrieval of data from external storage.

Create a Disaster Kit

Plan in advance by creating a disaster kit that includes a list of operating system configurations, a configuration sheet of the partition on the hard disk, a redundant array of independent disks configuration (RAID), a list of hardware configuration and so on. This material is quite easy to compile and can minimize the recovery time, much of which can be spent trying to locate information or records required to configure the recovery system.

Phase 4: Implementation

Once you have the infrastructure components and a storage plan has been defined for service backup and recovery, your organization can install the solution and storage management tools and monitor the system in the IT environment.

Operations

Monitoring and resource management, storage management for backups and recovery systems that are used in the production environments are extremely important tasks. Whether the process is centralized or distributed, it should be given the technologies and procedures for backup and recovery. In the end, you should have the ability to easily monitor and analyze the availability, capacity and performance of the storage management system.

The storage resource management (SRM Storage Resource Management) is a key storage management focused on ensuring that storage devices, such as disks, format and have installed the appropriate file systems.

Typically, the tools used in the production environment to monitor and manage storage resources consist of functions that are provided as part of the operating system installed or provided with other solutions such as Microsoft Data Protection Manager.

Using a system of administration of storage resources requires skills and apprenticeships. You should know some of the basics needed to properly monitor and manage storage resources, and analyze the results. Moreover, selecting the right tool for each job group increases the ability of operations to ensure the availability, capacity and performance of storage resources.

Tags: computer repair sacramento, computer service sacramento, sacramento computer repair, sacramento computer service