ITechnique Australia

Prevention or cure?

The most important asset in a business’ computing system is the information, or data. Backing up your data is essential to ensure you can recover it after a data loss event, but isn’t prevention better than cure?

That’s where data and hard drive redundancy plays it’s part (a hard drive is where all of your data is stored within the computer – commonly referred to as the ‘C: drive’). Building redundancy into your servers and network not only prevents your business from losing data in the first place, it also prevents the downtime normally experienced even when you do have up-to-date backups.

Most technologies are best planned and implemented before you’ve started using your network and server – that is, you should be planning your redundancy before you’ve purchased your server and network hardware, otherwise implementation can be more cumbersome and costly.

There are several redundancy technologies available today, and until recent times many of the technologies have been out of reach of the small to medium business market, mainly due to the cost. One of the most common and cost effective redundancy methods is hard drive mirroring.

Hard drive mirroring is a system whereby your server (or servers) contains two storage drives. All of your data is then mirrored onto both drives simultaneously and transparently (users don’t request this or even need to know that it is happening).

One of the most common causes of data loss is drive failure. If a server without redundant drives has a drive failure, the server crashes and is then unavailable until the drive is replaced, all software (operating system) is reinstalled, and then your business data and applications are restored from backup. This could mean downtime of several hours or even days.

If one of the disks in a mirrored system fails, the server continues operating as normal, but notifies an administrator of the failure. Then, at your earliest convenience a new drive is installed to replace the failed unit, and the mirror is restored with virtually no downtime.

Not only does this save the downtime and stress associated with restoration of data, but it saves your server administrator from having to rebuild and reinstall all server software and configuration, which often cannot be backed up. A server may have had hundreds of configuration changes over its life, and reconfiguring all of these changes after a failed disk drive can mean that a server is offline for quite some time - before you’ve even started to restore data from backups.

During this time you will most probably be unable to use your business' computer(s), which could result in lost income as your patients may need to have their appointments re-scheduled.

If you’re concerned about your business' data (and who isn’t?), and to minimise downtime and lost revenue, you should make it a priority that your network and servers have built in redundancy. For more info feel free to give us a call on 1300 788 301 or email at info@itechnique.com.au

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