The sessions in this track deal with the preparation, testing and survival of major disasters. These sessions cover all of the issues faced in disaster recovery and contingency planning.
The following sessions are from the Spring 2008 conference:
DR01: Disaster Avoidance Strategies in an Ever Changing Environment
Donna Manley, IT Senior Director, University of Pennsylvania
Business operations today are more dependent than ever before on data center uptime. In this real-time, often online environment, just planning for business recovery is not enough. This session will outline simple precautionary strategies that can supplement other business continuity and disaster recovery efforts through process creativity and controls.
DR02: Recovery Prioritization – Don’t Lose IT!
Robert Thaler, Senior Marketing Director, Acronis Inc.
In the world of business where minutes are measured in millions of dollars, the ability to get back up and running after an interruption is the most important part of any disaster recovery/business continuity plan. A big part of any disaster recovery plan is the backup and recovery of data. Backup is the easy part. It takes place when everything is working, probably at regularly scheduled intervals and usually when it is most convenient. Of course, after a disaster, it is the recovery part that matters the most. It is unplanned and unexpected. A recovery program should start with mission critical data and applications and then go on to everything else. This session will help develop an efficient and effective data protection system that matches your goals. We will discuss data integrity in relation to snapshot technology and the importance of being able to do a bare metal restore, which allows you to restore to totally separate, dissimilar hardware. Whether you choose a continuous data protection solution for your transactional database, a file-based system for your Web servers, or an image-based solution for your critical servers, it is all about recovering quickly, efficiently, and with the least amount of disruption.
DR03: Disaster Prevention: The Four Protocols to Controlling Contamination
Richard Hill, President, Data Clean Corporation
This session will discuss four areas of data center contamination control: design, air flow, protocol and cleaning. Attendees will understand the adverse effects a contaminated data center can cause and be given solutions for its prevention and control. Dust, dirt and various particles will quickly shut down servers and raise the costs to keep them cool. Attendees will hear true-life experiences of how contamination caused constant server shutdowns in one installation and how simple contamination detection and elimination reduced these shutdowns by 69 percent. Data center managers will gain awareness of potential contamination and be given solutions to eliminate and/or reduce those problems.
DR04: Case Studies of Data Backups, Recovery and Outsourcing
Rich Schiesser, President, RWS Enterprises, Inc.
The ever-increasing dependence of businesses today on large amounts of online information brings with it ever-increasing challenges for data backup and recovery. As companies expand, they are under continual pressure to avoid downtime and to safeguard expanding amounts of data, and at the same time comply with the provisions of Sarbanes-Oxley (SOX). This session consists of three separate case studies of how companies planned for, dealt with, and recovered from actual disasters. These events had direct impact on data backups and restorations, SOX compliance and outsourcing options. The responses to each event led to several valuable lessons learned, including a few surprises.
DR05: Are Your Data Center DR/BC Plans Enough? How lessons from the American Red Cross Can Benefit You
Mark McNulty, CEO, Chief Connection Officer
Everyone understands that disaster recovery and business continuity plans for data centers are becoming more vital over time. However, there are different kinds and classes of disasters that impact the data center/network infrastructure not typically well understood or adequately planned for. This presentation will address effective means for preparation and planning, not the least of which is C-level involvement. For example, Sarbanes-Oxley extends personal liability to executives based on how their companies react to a disaster. This presentation will include an executive from Red Cross National Headquarters to share personal perspectives as well.
DR06: Identifying and Eliminating Single Points of Failure in the Data Center
Ray Baumann, Data Center Manager, Arch Chemicals
This is a case study focusing on one data center’s experience and results when it recently implemented a single point of failure methodology that produced a prioritized laundry list of potential data center vulnerabilities. In doing this, it created a checklist of all potential single points of failure to the data center focusing on the physical infrastructure, the computing hardware, the network, and any other item that could potentially lead to an enterprise outage. You will also learn how it produced an action plan after the study was complete and how its priorities were determined. All attendees will receive a single point of failure template (Excel) that can be tailored for their own organization.
