March 5, 2015
Disaster Recovery: a real-life example
ITS delivers...to help our customer maintain vital energy deliveries
Disaster Recovery (DR) involves a set of policies and procedures to enable the recovery or continuation of vital IT infrastructure and systems following a natural or human-induced disaster. DR is something a true enterprise company budgets for as a form of insurance, a necessary cost to maintain the business in the event of a catastrophic data loss or system malfunction.
However, many smaller non-enterprise businesses need enterprise-grade support for their systems. This is the story of how ITS helped one such company recover from a potentially catastrophic data loss.
The challenge
A long-term customer of ITS relies on its IT system to schedule oil and gas deliveries, issue invoices to their customers, and pay their vendors. However, they lack a true enterprise DR program. Further, their IT system had not been routinely backed-up for two months when a disaster situation cropped up just hours before the New Year’s Eve holiday.
On Tuesday, December 30th at 6:30AM, the first employee to arrive at the offices called the company owner to say the production server was inoperable. The owner’s call to their support provider yielded no immediate solution, so at 8:30 he reached out to the ITS team for assistance.
The ITS solution
After working with the customer remotely to troubleshoot their system, the ITS team determined that the server was too severely distressed to boot. The hardware manufacturer, despite their best efforts, could not promise to deliver the parts or expertise to fully recover the company’s data in a timely fashion—if at all.
During the late morning hours on December 30th, the ITS team started pulling together a spare machine that we were confident would handle the data we hoped to extract from the disabled disks.
By 2:30 pm, we had tested the machine and loaded it into the car of our President/COO, who delivered this standby server to the customer site.
By 5:30 pm, the server was on-site, and the customers’ disks were installed in theITS recovery server.
By 5:50, their data was proven to be intact and access was restored for all operations to continue, including the scheduling of oil and gas deliveries—a crucial service in the middle of a New England winter.
It was not until two days later (Friday, January 2) that the manufacturer’s team was able to deliver all the parts and the customer was able to provide the staff on-site necessary to repair the disabled server.
Lesson learned: maintenance is not always enough!
While a 24/7 hardware maintenance plan is an important part of a disaster recovery solution, it does not guarantee that a company can maintain operations.
Distance from parts depots and holiday schedules make it difficult to deliver on that commitment in real life.
ITS, Inc. offers High Availability and Disaster Recovery solutions for all the platforms we support. Two of the most effective are remotely hosted servers synchronizing data from your production site; and cost-effective secondary servers you can install at a remote office or your home.
Don’t wait for a near disaster to protect your valuable IT system: contact ITS for ideas about how to protect yourself from a server failure, today.
Thanks for reading,
Rob Connary, President - COO
