Business Continuity and Disaster Recovery

Business Continuity and Disaster Recovery

For the first time since I became a Datto partner, I had to use their BCDR (Business Continuity and Disaster Recovery) applications in a live environment for one of my biggest clients.

Running a server that manages file sharing and a business-critical database application, it came to my attention on the weekend that the server was offline after a power outage. Due to the RMM monitoring agent that is configured on the server, I was notified via email that something was not right on the network.

Datto Siris SB31000

I asked the business owner on the Sunday to go in and turn on the server. Much to her dismay, the server would not power on.
Into the car I jumped and went on site and determined that the server would not, in fact power on. There was an issue with the power supply or motherboard.

The server was under warranty, so all we had to do was log a support call with Dell to get the machine fixed.

But what to do in the meantime?

Luckily, I am using Datto’s BCDR service and we were running hourly backups to a SIRIS-S3B1000 device.

All I had to do was logon to the BCDR portal and spin up a virtual copy of the server from the last good backup and we were back up and running.

It took 36 hours for the server to get repaired, however unknown to the staff they were running off the virtual server with access to the application and public drive. There was not one minute of downtime to the business.

Once the server was repaired, I went back onsite and did a restore of the virtual machine back to the server. All the changes and work done in the past two days were uploaded to the server. This process to about 1 hour due to the amount of data on the hard drives. This was done after hours so there was no impact to the business.

So, in the background, we had a pretty major catastrophe, but to the business there was no issue or outage at all.

With the old system of backups, we had running before Datto BCDR, we would have had a server outage for 36 hours causing considerable downtime to the business. We would not have lost any data, but we would have had 2 days of downtime for their critical database application. The cost to the business in downtime and reputation would have been significantly more than the cost of the backup solutions.

The client is happy, and I had a lot less stress, it was a win/win situation for all.

If you are interested in some more information on our Business Continuity/Disaster Recovery solutions, fill in the contact form or call us on 1300 747 434