Continuous Data Replication – Is This ‘Goodbye’ to Your RPO?
Traditional data backup happens once every so often – once an hour, once a day, once a week, for example, depending on the recovery requirements associated with the data. It’s typically the recovery point objective or RPO that determines the frequency of the backup. If you cannot afford to lose more than the last 30 […]
Tape Backup Developments – Death-Defying or Simply Better?
Considered by some to be obsolescent, obsolete or virtually flat-lining, tape backup is still around. Even new hard drive technology and solid state storage cannot match the price point per terabyte stored. Now IBM and Fujifilm have pushed the envelope even further with new tape cartridge that can hold 154 terabytes of data. By comparison, […]
Disaster Recovery Lessons from Radiology
When hospitals moved from film-based hardcopy systems to electronic images, they began to generate large amounts of data held on PACS – Picture Archiving and Communications Systems. Hospitals use various ‘modalities’ to scan patients, including Computer Tomography, Magnetic Resonance Imaging and Ultrasound systems. These modalities must regularly (and frequently) upload the scanned images to the […]
A Theorem for IT Disaster Recovery – But With Practical Application
If you look through the literature on disaster recovery, you’ll probably see that practical ideas, recommendations and methods abound – but that theory is in rather shorter supply. This makes sense in that all those IT systems and networks are running now – so if they break, you’ll want some good ‘cookbooks’ or ‘how-to’s’ for […]
Emergency Management – Getting Ahead of the Social Media Test Curve
Social media is increasingly being looked to as a tool for emergency management. It has a number of attractive characteristics, including cloud-based resiliency and being well-known and understood by a large portion of the public and professionals alike. The problem that many organisations face is in knowing how to prepare their use of social media. […]
Disaster Recovery, Horses for Courses and Other Metaphors
Just think how exciting the world of disaster recovery has become. What used to be exclusively tape storage has branched out into all kinds of disk storage, virtual snapshots, deduplication and cloud object storage. That’s great for DR managers, right? Not so fast. One of the central elements of disaster recovery is risk mitigation, which […]