The Unlikely Disaster

Recently a small earthquake rattled the Virginia, DC, Maryland area.  While there was no serious damage, the quake brought to light the fact that disaster can strike in the most unlikely way.  Those who live in California know of the danger and destruction an earthquake can bring, but folks in DC don’t share this understanding because earthquakes in the area a few and far between.  The moral of this event is that we must always be ready for the unlikely disaster.

Without a doubt, each geographic location has it’s own idea of what natures disaster may occur.  Earthquakes in the West, blizzards in the Midwest, Tornados in the plains, and hurricanes in the East.  But the reality is that Mother Nature is women with the prerogative to change her mind at will, and being prepared for one type of disaster may not leave you prepared for another.  Even small natural disasters can impact large regional areas.

Business Continuity follows the same precept in that planning for a certain type of outage does not guarantee that you are protected for other types of outages as well.  Power, cellular, telecom, and internet outages can wreak havoc on your business.  So while you may have the ability to move your business to a CoLo facility, if they are down as well you BC plan is of no value. 

Unfortunately, many BC & DR solutions on the market today don’t meat customer needs.  Instead, they lure customers into a false sense of security that their business is protected.  So while working on your BC plan, be sure to look at the big picture and think about the small, medium, and large disasters as well as the unlikely ones that can destroy your business.

Good planning!

Business Continuity for the iPad and iPhone

With the releases of the iPad and iPhone 4 businesses are being put in an interesting position when it comes to Business Continuity.  For the past few years the iPhone has been the up and coming player for Enterprise email.  While it has not surpassed the Blackberry, it’s adoption rate is very high.  Now the iPad enters the fight and adds a new dynamic to your BC planning.

Exchange is the Linchpin 

  For most “I” users, access to email is the single most important feature for their device of choice.  Because most organizations use Exchange, supporting “I” devices is relatively easy with Active Sync.  But as more users become dependant on remote email access, providing BC for Exchange becomes even more critical.  With users in the office it is easy to see the effect of an Exchange outage.  But mobile users are unseen and unknown, accessing their inboxes 24 x 7 x 365.  Installing Windows updates at 3:00am on a Sunday could easily result in calls to the helpdesk wondering when Exchange will be back online.  Having published maintenance windows and SLA’s is critical to ensure everyone in your company has a clear understanding of what to expect with regards to your servers.

Intranet and Application Access

  With the iPad, accessing your companies intranet and applications is much easier than ever before and as such uptime for these services becomes a new or updated headache.  Providing proven and consistent availability for your servers is crucial to keeping the business productive and users happy. 

24 x 7 x 365!

While remote access is not a new technology, both the iPad and the iPhone 4 make it much simpler for a whole new groups of users to access a variety of services. Gone are the days of the required VPN.  Users can easily access files and data from anywhere in the world at any time.  Providing Business Continuity has just become much more complex.  Time to update your BC plan!

Hyper-V R2 – It’s Not Just for Servers!

For the past 15 years I have found interesting ways to test and demo different software and operating systems.  In my early engineer days I had a spare hard drive that I would swap into my computer and boot from that served as my test platform.  As technology progressed I had to a spare computer for testing that I would wipe out and reinstall on a regular basis.  With the advent of virtualization I started to run a hybrid of both physical and virtual machines to meet my needs.  But in the past 5 years, virtual technology has completely dominated my demos and tests.

Virtual Server 2005

When Microsoft released Virtual Server 2005, most technology pundits dismissed it as a futile attempt to go after the VMware production virtual market.  But some of us embraced the technology for what it was: a simple, easy, light-weight, demo and test platform.  Instead of having to install a heavy application that stole precious resources from Windows XP and Vista, Virtual Server was a simple web based app that took advantage of integration with the host OS.  Although it didn’t have all the features of VMware Workstation, it was very stable and effective for giving product demos on a laptop.

Hyper-V RTM

When Hyper-V was released for Windows Server 2008, it became apparent that Microsoft was taking Enterprise virtualization seriously.  Despite it’s limited feature set, Hyper-V was another good solution for product demos.  It’s biggest flaw for this type of use was getting Server 2008 installed on a laptop.  Driver incompatibility and non-existent drivers plagued many laptop owners who wanted to walk the razors edge.  Although it wasn’t impossible to run Hyper-V on a laptop, it was definitely a daunting task.

Windows 7 & Hyper-V R2

Today Microsoft has a veritable panacea available to engineers for test and demo:  Windows 7 & Server 2008 R2.  If you own a laptop from a major manufacturer that runs Windows 7 x64 then the chances are good that you can download Windows 7 drivers that are WHQL.  Most of theses drivers will work in Server 2008 R2, and if your processor supports virtualization then you can also run Hyper-V R2.  While running a server OS on a laptop is not a common occurrence for most folks, it is has become an increasing trend in the “engineer” space. 

Robust Demo and Test Built-in

With Windows 7 and Server 2008 R2 sharing a common architecture and kernel, running 2008 R2 as my main laptop OS is a true pleasure.  Dual cores and 4GB of RAM provide plenty of horsepower to run all my applications, as well as supporting 3 VM’s concurrently.  With virtualization built right into the OS, demo’s are again simple and convenient. 

Yes, there are trade-offs that must be taken into consideration when running Server 2008 as your primary OS.  Cost, hardware and application compatibility, backup, and support are just a few.  But for some of us, these trade-offs are well worth having robust, built-in virtualization.

Running Windows Server 2008 R2 with Hyper-V on your laptop may be a worthwhile venture if you find yourself doing lots of product demos or tests.  Hyper-V R2 – It’s Not Just for Servers!

Business Continuity for Windows VM’s

While working the Double-Take booth at TechEd this week I had a customer ask me about Business Continuity for her virtual machines.  It seems that her IT staff was split between using Microsoft’s Hyper-V and VMware ESXi, so finding a solid, affordable  DR tool was proving to be difficult. 

“One Tool” Application Availability and Recovery Capabilities

Over the next ten minutes or so I explained to her that Double-Take for Virtual Systems provides real-time, byte level replication for Windows and Linux VM’s regardless of the Hyper-Visor that is being used.  In fact, it is one of the only tools on the market that allows you to protect Hyper-V VM’s to VMware VM’s, and visa versa.

We also discussed one of the greatest advantages of using Double-Take in your BC plans is that it is not platform centric.  Double-Take is a true X to X technology that spans all applications, hardware, and virtualization.  Having the flexibility to protect a physical server to a VM is great, but having the flexibility to protect any server to any server is very powerful.  And with Double-Take’s unified management console you can have a since place from which to configure, protect, and monitor you environment.

As we finished our conversation, she thanked me for the information and gave me her card and I promised to have her local engineer get in touch with her.

Double-Take is a fantastic tool for providing Business Continuity for any application or server, physical or virtual.

What to Do When Disaster Strikes? 10 Tips That Can Help

Step One: Evaluate the Disaster

The first step of any disaster recovery plan is to stay calm and evaluate the disaster before enacting your business continuity plan.  The type and severity of disaster you encounter will determine which actions you must take. For example, if the disaster is a danger to the building then you must first evacuate employees to safe meeting zones. However, if there is a weather or environmental related event then evacuating the building may not be a good idea.

If the event is not a risk to any employees and the business impact is acceptable, the priority would be to resolve the issue to resume business operations.  But for disasters that are threat to your data center here are a few tips to consider.

Step Two: What to do when disaster strikes

1. Follow your company evacuation plans to make sure everyone is out of the facility and safe.

1. Once at the designated evacuation meeting points, perform a head count of your employees and verify no one is left behind.

1. Inform local officials of your employee head count and status of the building.

1. If the disaster is likely to cause significant damage to the data center begin implementing IT failover and recovery plans.

1. Contact recovery vendors. If you don’t have a hot site then you may need to have archived tape delivered which could take 24 hours.

1. Head to the co-location, disaster recovery, or hot site to begin restoration of business critical applications.

1. Communicate. Notify executives and employees of the plans and length of time it may take to recover.

1. Begin restoration of those services that are required to resume business operations to a functional level.

1. Return to the corporate office to evaluate data center damage once backup systems are operational and emergency officials have deemed it is safe and acceptable to do so.

1. Verify your insurance coverage, determine what damaged hardware, software and or infrastructure that may need to be replaced and compile a full list. The insurance company will want to see this as well as the replacement cost.

No one wants to encounter a disaster, but being prepared will make the recovery significantly easier.

The “Joys” of a Workcation?

I just got back from a family trip to Disney World where we baked in the hot Florida sun.  After a hard day of waiting in lines, riding rides, and eating terrible food, I tried to relax by reading my email and catching up on the day’s events outside the Magic Kingdom.  That's when it hit me that most of us never really take a true vacation!

 

When is the last time you went somewhere not work related, but still took work with you?  Blackberry, iPhone, iPad, Laptop?  It’s all the same.  Even when your not working your still working.  You setup your “Out of Office” email, but still check your email regularly and reply anyway.  I would venture to guess that you even check your voicemail while away.  You (we) do all this because you’re worried about your servers, network, applications, users or a million other things that can go wrong in the Windows IT world.  Nobody wants to come back to a disaster that you didn’t even know happened.

It is important to know that your Business Continuity plan is not only insurance for your company, but should server as a piece of mind for you.  It is designed to provide a basic level of redundancy in administration in the event of a disaster.  BC plans are designed as a pseudo “play book” that a designated backup person should be able to follow in the event that you are on vacation or are unavailable.

So while you may still check your email and voicemail for other reasons, building a good Business Continuity plan can help you relax while on vacation and enjoy the time off.

Work hard on a good BC plan and play hard on vacation without the worry!  Enjoy………

Windows 7 “God Mode”

Windows 7 has a unique feature that some refer to as “God Mode”.  It is a Control Panel like window with sections for Action Center, Administrative Tools, AutoPlay, etc.

Here's how you enable it:

1. Create a new folder (right-click and click on “New Folder”).
2. Right-click on the folder and click on rename, copy and paste the following:
3. GodMode.{ED7BA470-8E54-465E-825C-99712043E01C}
4. Hit Enter and your good to go!

There are some very interesting tweaks, but use at your own risk.

Enjoy!