Disaster Recovery

I work as a Server Engineer. Recently my company has been looking into planning for Disaster Recovery (DR). In the I.T. biz, that means making sure we have all our data and applications online in case something really bad happens. Things like flooding in the Data Center (DC), or some nitwit in a backhoe cutting all our fiber links to our remote DC. Stuff like that. Computer systems are not designed from the get-go for DR. For example you cannot have a subnet online in two geographical locations without some big $ being thrown around.

So I thought I would see if some of these thoughts would work for prepping. In a DR scenario you split your applications up into different tiers. Let's take a fictional company's applications for an example.

Payroll
Accounts payable
Accounts receivable & billing
Inventory
Shipping
Home directories file share
HR file share
Intranet web site
Extranet website
E-mail
Printing

Ok so that's a small list of the applications used by a small company. Most of the mail order companies of any size will have at least this many apps. The hard part is to group them into levels of importance.

Tier 1
E-mail
Inventory
Accounts receivable & billing
Extranet website
Printing

Tier 2
Payroll
Accounts payable
Shipping

Tier 3
HR file share
Intranet website
Home directories file share

So for our example let's say we are an online survival store. Now, the idea of the I.T. department is to make sure orders go into the system as the most important. This way users out in cyberspace don't go run off to your competitors when your DC gets flooded. Picking tickets need to be printed so the warehouse guys can pull orders while the rest of the systems are brought back online.

A word about the tiers. The tier 1 applications are your core. You cannot operate without these at all. Tier 2 need to be available for weekly or monthly tasks, and tier 3 are the little things that make life easy. I think I see some parallels already.

But onto this company. Now what most DR planners forget is that none of these systems will run at all without some infrastructure. A network, account authentication, etc. So let's add a tier 0.

Tier 0
Active Directory
Network
Power

So many DR consultants forget to plan for power. That wafer of silicon ain't doing jack shit without some electrons there, buddy!

Well you get the idea. Now in DR planning we talk of an alternate site. This site is either a Cold, Warm, or Hot site. If you are a fortune 500 company we can talk about hot sites, otherwise your too poor. A hot site is fully online simultaneously with your primary site. Downtime (if at all) is measured in seconds.

Warm sites are up, but might need infrastructure to be changed in order to go online. Like shutting down a subnet in one data center and bringing it up in your DR network. Recovery is measured in hours.

Then there is the Cold site, which is just about useless. Sometimes hardware needs to be ordered, or physically carried form your production site, dried out, then powered on and tested. Trust me from past experience this sucks hairy monkey balls.

Ok now after that hour long explanation, let's see how this works in the prepping world. Let's start with the sites.

A hot site would be where you have all the equipment and supplies pre-staged and ready to go. Now if you live at your retreat, that's not a hot site. That's your primary site, and your DR site might be a debris shelter in a national park... Anyway, very few people will be able to afford this. Since I didn't win Mass Millions, I'm still poor, and cannot afford this.

A warm site would have the infrastructure ready, but not everything is ready to go. This could also be a friend's or family member's house out of state.

A cold site is just that. You got what you can carry, that's it.

Now onto the tiering of the prepper's infrastructure:

Tier 0
Health

Tier 1
Shelter
Water
Food

Tier 2
Security
Communications

Tier 3
Power
Gasoline/diesel
Luxuries

Now it's interesting that I made Health a Tier 0. I did this because you're not doing squat if you got dysentery, a broken leg, or a new hole somewhere there ain't supposed to be one. The rest I think are self-explanatory. Hope this simple system helps a few out there get rolling on planning what is important, and what isn't. Sure, a gas grill is nice to have, along with that nifty new flashlight, but a tent is more critical to your survival.

I also hope people start to think about the next step. There are a lot of people ready to make a stand at their remote homes, but your still need a backup site in case a forest fire or flood, or who-knows-what-else happens. Even if it's a barn at your brother-in-law's on the other side of the valley.

Don't forget now is the time to stock up on mason jars. I bought 5 cases of quart jars for ~$10 a box. I'll be working my foodsaver overtime this week packing away food.