Media Storage: Business Continuity and Disaster Recovery

I got some great feedback from my friend Kevin McClanahan on a previous post about Media Storage. He re-framed the issue in terms of two hot topics in storage right now: Business Continuity and Disaster Recovery. These ideas can be scaled from a lone freelancer to a multi-national company.

“Business Continuity is basically a redundant system in case your current system dies. That could be as simple as a copy of the data local to the user to a much more robust solution including offsite backups that can be recovered very quickly. Depending on the users/companies needs the backup could be a second hard drive stored at the users home vs office or a much more robust solution mirroring the users system in another building on the complex for example. This protects against situations like isolated fires, etc.”

“Disaster Recovery is more geared toward situations like the tsunami in Japan.” In the event of a massive disaster, a California based company might use, “mirrored storage in Las Vegas (different tectonic plate) to ensure that someone would be able to get all of the west coast back online within a day or so.”

“Again all of this depends on the users situation, but if they are making a business out of this, they should consider these things at least for a moment.”



See also Rob Schlette’s excellent article 5 Steps for More Dependable Hard Drives at theProAudioFiles.com.