[OPLINTECH] Disaster Recovery plan

[Joe Knueven]

With a limited budget, I would be incline to pass on #1.  Perhaps I'm wrong, but it seems like from what I've seen, you'd spend far more money than you want just for the privilege of them holding your data for you.
(the way I've always thought about this is if there was a disaster so broad that the library was destroyed and my off site locations were destroyed, my server configurations would be the least of my worries...)

To a certain extent, we do something more or less like #2 here.  We have two servers running Xenserver, and everything that we use on a day to day basis could be ran on just one of them.  In fact, the first layer of my backup strategy is to keep an image of each virtual server on the one that it does not normally run on.  That way, if the other one fails, I boot up the backup image, change my networking settings and away we go.

This will perhaps sound horrible to some, but one of the things that I've done in the past for some critical systems that don't require much in the way of resources, is to run them on bare metal using old staff or public PCs.  In this case, I have 3 or more of them laying around, so if the hardware does fail, I have an identical system that I can load a backup of the image onto and minimize downtime.  (you'd be amazed at how long an old Dell P4 will continue to run more or less idling with Linux on it..).

That said, as the budget has allowed I've slowly moved those systems away from 10+ year old workstation hardware, although I have preferenced keeping a cold standby system on hand, ideally with one of the backups already loaded onto it, so that the only downtime is literally the time it takes to turn on the computer.

So, the short version is I would think that what you're doing currently with your NAS/portable drives and going to a primary and backup server ought to be sufficient.  Obviously, what I've done or what you're doing would not scale up well, but it works with a smaller site..

Best of luck.

Joe


Joseph Knueven
Director
Germantown Public Library
51 N. Plum St.
Germantown, OH 45327
937-855-4001
joe at gtownlibrary.net

From: oplintech-bounces at lists.oplin.org [mailto:oplintech-bounces at lists.oplin.org] On Behalf Of Fred Miller Jr
Sent: Tuesday, January 05, 2016 4:38 PM
To: oplintech at lists.oplin.org
Subject: [OPLINTECH] Disaster Recovery plan

Wanted to reach out to some people with a little more experience than I have when trying to implement a disaster recovery option for your library. Currently we just back up our virtual servers to a NAS box then off load them back to USB portable drives that get switched out once a week with an offsite location. Wondered if anyone could recommend what they have tried and what has worked? Some things I have thought about are:

1.       Letting a 3rd party manage the disaster recovery backup, but then I worry about security issues (Cloud Management???)

2.       Having two servers at our location with one server being the main and the other being the backup in case of hardware failure
My main goal is to have something in place where downtime is minimal until the main server is back up and running. Currently we just have one physical server using XenServer using XenCenter to house our virtual machines. This is my first go around with setting something up like this. My budget is limited.

Thanks again in advance for all the help and replies,

Fred Miller Jr.
IT Service Manager
Auglaize County Public District Library System
203 S. Perry St.
Wapakoneta, OH 45895
Ph: 419-738-2921
Fax: 419-738-5168
www.auglaizelibraries.org<http://www.auglaizelibraries.org>

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