This week a customer asked about our Disaster Recovery plan so I thought I would talk about some of the safeguards we use to make sure your data is safe and that we could carry on production in the event of adverse conditions. 

In my opinion there are three key components to properly planning to get production back up and running at Argo after a natural disaster.  The components are Legacy Data, Current Data and Production Environment.

1. Legacy data
So as you can imagine we have a lot of data! We have our first project ever done from 1995 all the way through projects done today. At an average of 1500 projects per year that is an estimated 24,000 archived projects. Properly storing this data and yet having quick access to the data is a challenge.

At the end of each year we take the projects completed in that calendar year and transition them to our Network Attached Storage server (NAS). We also transition a copy to an external hard drive and move it off premises. That way we have easy and fast access to old projects but yet we have a copy stored off site in case of a disaster. This allows for a safe backup off site but yet allows us to quickly find old projects.

2. Current data
We used to use a 21 tape backup routine with only two tapes on premises at any given time. We realized that this process was a little outdated and certainly had some holes in it! Tape failure, forgetting tapes, leaving tapes in the office by accident, etc. So we moved to an online solution run by a company called Ubistor. They are a SAS 70 certified company and their customers include the Chicago Mercantile Exchange and many other large corporations in the Chicago area. You can read about the firm here:

http://www.ubistor.com/company/data_center.php

We have tested the recovery of files and it is quick and easy.

3.  Plan for Natural Disaster at Argo Headquarters (Production environment)
We also do Bare Metal Restore backups on two of our key servers used in production that would allow us to order virtual servers at Ubistor and restore the BMR backup into their data center. This would allow us to be fully operational after a Disaster within hours rather than days.

This is a little more expensive than our old DR plan but it certainly gives us (and hopefully our customers) peace of mind!

Please let us know if you have any questions about our plan.