Category Archives: High Availability (HA)

Your Business is Under Attack from “Them”

What kind of attacks affect businesses in Arizona?

Arizona and Phoenix Metro in particular are not any more vulnerable than other parts of the country when it comes to Natural disaster. As a matter of fact when it comes to natural disasters, Phoenix is listed as the second safest city in U.S. Metro Areas with 1 million inhabitants or more, Rochester, New York being the safest.

Rochester, New York
Phoenix, Arizona
Columbus, Ohio
Buffalo, New York
Cincinnati, Ohio

We are lucky enough to avoid, tornadoes, volcanoes, hurricanes, earth quakes, floods, & wildfires more than most other major cites. Unsurprisingly, many businesses locate their call centers, data centers, and office operations in Arizona taking advantage of the relatively disaster free state and metropolitan area. What then if anything do business need to worry about if we are mostly free from natural attacks? Although we enjoy relative natural stability, mother nature can still pack a wallop when she wants to.

Lightning and Power, and Heat, Oh My!

Major Metropolitan areas of Arizona can breath a sigh of relief when it comes to most massive natural disasters, however, we are still significantly affected by smaller natural attacks such as lightning which can kick up quite severe in our Monsoon season. Lightning strikes in Arizona annually cause dozens of businesses to lose equipment and data because of their notorious effect on electronics and storage devices. Most businesses are inadequately protected from lightning strikes because they fail to invest in lightning protection equipment and fail to adequately store their sensitive data on high availability backup systems. Arizona heat directly and indirectly affect sensitive equipment and electrical systems in AZ. When the temperatures rise, so does demand on the grid. Older parts of the grid and poorly supplied buildings become more susceptible to “brown outs” and “power spikes” caused by fluctuating power. That variance in power wreaks havoc on computer systems and consequently the data that exists on those systems. As an IT professional I have personally seen power variations damage hundreds of systems in every sort of business over the past dozen years in the Phoenix area. What strikes me funny is the surprised look on people’s faces when I tell them “power destroyed your system”, as if this thought had never occurred to them before. Surge protectors are good, and UPS systems are even better, but the best protection you can buy is in a backup system that continuously backs up your data and keeps your business going, even if a few systems are damaged by lightning, power, or anything else.

What’s the real “attack” threat?

Since so many businesses and so much data is located in Arizona, we face a more menacing threat than any natural disaster. We’re talking about Cyber Threats. Most businesses are not nearly paranoid enough when it comes to cyber crime. Most business spend money on external prevention and internal authentication without addressing data accountability and recovery. IN other words:

“Arizona is a prime location in the world to store Data. Data is more valuable than gold to many people around the planet. This makes Arizona and many businesses located here a major target for cyber criminals, hackers, and data thieves.”

In March of 2013, U.S. Army General Keith Alexander, who is head of the U.S. military’s Cyber Command, said cyber attacks on private companies were getting much worse. He stated that the intensity & number of attacks will grow significantly throughout the year.

May 31st, 2013, Defense Secretary Chuck Hagel stated that cyber-threats pose a quiet, stealthy, insidious danger to the United States. Hagel Quoted, “Cyber threats are real, they’re terribly dangerous,”

The question then becomes, what do we do about it? Prevention is important to be sure. That means implementing the best firewalls, security software, and security policies you can. Equally important, considering the threat, is what to do if your data is stolen, destroyed, compromised. etc. Finding and eliminating the threat are top priorities, next is restoring your data. It’s important to know that your data is stored safely with many revisions available in an offsite location so that you can quickly recover your data. If your live data is corrupt, you need to find revisions of files that are not compromised and bring those back into your live data set efficiently. Does your existing disaster recovery plan account for this?

Remember, cyber criminals do not only exist in a vacuum in China, Pakistan, or Russia, they exist in your organization, your vendors, your public cloud, or your ISP. Sometimes data compromise and corruption occurs by accident from errant software or a careless employee, or even faulty hardware. Prevention and cure are the main focuses when dealing with cyber threats. If your prevention fails, will your cure be quick, efficient and painless, or just as horrifying as the attack itself?

Pull your resources and make Data Security happen within your own company. Work on your business continuity planning and your data recovery planning. If you’re not up to the task, get a professional IT company to help you with the task. Use the best you can find.

To illustrate how many businesses are seeking solutions for Disaster/Data Recovery issues, I’ve researched monthly web inquiries and plotted the results in an infographic that you may find useful.

Disaster Recovery | Infographics

If you have questions or need assistance, please reply to this blog or contact us directly. We’re here to help.

One Backup Plan Fits All

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I love the idea of one size fits all because it sounds easy and definite. However, the promise of one size fits all is something that I learned to steer away from in life. I suppose it was my experience in the military that first debunked this great idea.

One size does occasionally fit all, but not always. My drill sergeant assured me that the if my equipment stated “one size fits all” that it would fit me, no matter what. I protested one time when a rain poncho I was wearing was clearly too big and I paid for it dearly. I had to practice rolling in a mud puddle for about 20 minutes in the freezing cold while everyone else was eating some hot chow under a canopy. After some time, I was asked if my rain poncho fit, and I replied “like a glove drill sergeant!”

Fortunately we don’t have to live in a world where businesses are forced to accept a solution that does not fit their needs, although some companies will try and make it fit, or make you believe it fits. A good IT solution provider will find the right solution for your business’ needs no matter what adjustments need to be made to a sales solution, or technical implementation. What I’m referring to here is flexibility in hardware & software choices and robust options in implementations of those chosen technologies.

Take for example a typical high availability backup system. You have servers that are backed up and resilient because of their high availability cloud solution. You then have all workstations backing up to the servers and the servers themselves backing up at night & during the day to the cloud. The cloud, usually 2 -3 data centers backup to each other.

simple cloud backup solution It’s a great solution, but what is the start-up cost? What is the monthly and yearly costs? What if you need high availability and cloud backup but it is cost prohibitive to your organization. So you throw your hands in the air and give up? Hopefully not. If you have a qualified IT firm taking care of your backup and high availability planning, they should be able to develop a system that may be scaled down but does not break the bank. Sometimes a simplified and scaled down solution can give you the protection and security you need.

The ability of your IT firm to scale packages up and down to meet the needs of their customers is crucial to the success of that client company. As a client you may want to ask some of the following questions to make sure that you’re getting the right solution. Your technology provider, or IT firm may not give you all the answers you want, but they should be able to give you informative answers that assist you in understanding your backup and high availability platforms.

What type of hardware do you use in your solution? Is it expensive to repair? Can it be upgraded as time goes by?
What type of software do you use in your solution? Can it ever be changed for something different?
If our business grows, will we need all new hardware for our backup system? Can we build on what we already have?
If we downsize our business and need to reduce costs, can we still maintain a backup or high availability platform and pay less money?
What will the cost difference be if we start with a smaller system and grow into a larger one?
If you implement a system that will quickly outgrow, will your firm absorb some of the cost for implementing a larger system?
What is the expected up-time for our data and our systems if we use the “x” recommended solution vs. the “y” solution?
What kind of support can we expect to receive if we implement your system? will it be 24×7 on the hardware and the software? Will there be additional fees?
How long is this technology expected to last? When we we have to switch to an entirely new type of technology?

Depending on your technology choice for backup and high availability, you may receive greatly varying answers, however, make sure that your solutions provider knows their products and they can remain flexible in providing you with the best possible cloud backup / availability system.

Blue Skies & Rain, Sunshine & High Availability Platforms

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We all wish for blue skies and sunshine!

When your computers are running great and the your servers are humming along fine, your work environment cam seem like blue skies and sunshine. However, planning for the day when server or workstation hard drives fail is more important than just your average backup planning. No, we are not talking about Disaster Recovery Planning this time, or your overall Business Continuity planning, but instead, your high availability planning, or just plain High Availability (HA)

In other words, how do you make sure that your critical servers and computer workstations stay up and running when hardware fails? How do you keep those critical server applications available when a server decides to take a dive? Ordinary backup can take a long time to recover and often does not include the very latest data. In addition, backups do nothing in the immediate when you lose hardware.

The answer: High Availability Planning.

Saving for a rainy day is all well and good, but isn’t it better to build a roof with gutters? High availability platforms provide your organization with the ability to absorb the unexpected stormy days and computer hardware crashes and keep you resiliently speeding along without missing a beat.

The goal of any high availability platform, or (environment), should be a minimum of 99.999% also referred to as the “five nines” That means no more than 5.26 minutes of total platform downtime per year as show in the chart below:

Availability %	Downtime per year	Downtime per month*	Downtime per week
90% (“one nine”)	36.5 days	72 hours	16.8 hours
95%	18.25 days	36 hours	8.4 hours
97%	10.96 days	21.6 hours	5.04 hours
98%	7.30 days	14.4 hours	3.36 hours
99% (“two nines”)	3.65 days	7.20 hours	1.68 hours
99.5%	1.83 days	3.60 hours	50.4 minutes
99.8%	17.52 hours	86.23 minutes	20.16 minutes
99.9% (“three nines”)	8.76 hours	43.8 minutes	10.1 minutes
99.95%	4.38 hours	21.56 minutes	5.04 minutes
99.99% (“four nines”)	52.56 minutes	4.32 minutes	1.01 minutes
99.999% (“five nines”)	5.26 minutes	25.9 seconds	6.05 seconds
99.9999% (“six nines”)	31.5 seconds	2.59 seconds	0.605 seconds
99.99999% (“seven nines”)	3.15 seconds	0.259 seconds	0.0605 seconds

As you might imagine 99.999% up time is a difficult target to reach, but ever more relevant in today’s “need it up and running right now” computing environment.

Wouldn’t it be nice if everything were in the “five nines” category. Think about it driving, no oil changes, no gassing up the vehicle, no red lights, not stopping for anything except perhaps a NASCAR tire change one per month. Ahhhh! That would be nice.

The truth is that most computing environments fall far short of the elusive 99.999% goal and most environment are lucky to hit a better than 97% goal overall. However, most environments don’t need to include every piece of IT technology in their High Availability (HA) solution.

For example. Do you need to include your fax machines and printers? The old computers that are not critical to the environments operations? How about laptops, or vendor equipment? Perhaps some of these items will not be counted in your (HA) plan and you can automatically exclude them and focus on the critical items.

For many organizations a typical very basic (HA) plan for their IT environment might look like this:

9 out of every 10 servers included in the plan
1 out of every 10 workstations included (because most employees can be moved to another workstation or a replacement is readily available)

*Network equipment sometimes has redundancy, but often times is not completely redundant and represents a Single Point of Failure in many organizations.

**Communications lines and links to the outside work are usually not redundant in most smaller environments and also represent Single Points of Failure and can represent significant downtime.

High Availability represented in the simplest way look like this:

Data : Redundant – Servers : Redundant – Workstation Functions : Redundant

There are many ways to implement (HA) and many different platforms to choose from. However, the most important thing you can do is educate yourself and make certain that your IT firm are experts that are well trained to adequately serve your needs.