Disaster Recovery from the Cloud…

I’m sure you’ve all heard about the massive rain and flooding that is affecting Queensland here in Australia at the moment.  My heart really goes out to those poor souls affected in the floods as they will likely have lost everything.  Few so far have lost their lives which is I guess so very fortunate.  Possessions can be replaced, life however never can. 

My primary webserver runs on a hosted platform with VMVault up in Brisbane’s central business district.  It was announced yesterday that it looks like the floods will hit Brisbane at levels not seen since the 1974 floods.  Power will be cut to sections of the CBD in advance of the floods to minimise potential problems.  I contacted VMVault to understand the potential impact to my services.  I was assured that they had diesel generators and they were well above the flood lines.  That’s cool and I should not have any problems as I have every confidence that they have thought this through.  However, I started to think about the infrastructure that feeds the datacentre – the phone and comms lines, the telephone exchanges that they run through.  I wondered if they would be ok.  They can’t control a lot of this, but maybe it might affect my services.  Again VMVault have assured me that they have redundant links in place and that everything should be fine.  That’s great confidence for you, but you know… I just want to be sure.

VMVault do backups for me using their infrastructure.  However In addition, I have ShadowProtect running backups on a regular basis to some NAS space that I have within the VMVault infrastructure.  Essentially however, outside of their facilities, I have nothing… no other backups, no other copy of my website, and the works I’ve written on it for the past 10 years.  Ouch. Realisation hit that maybe I should do something about that pretty quickly.

It also struck me that with the move to the cloud, that not only myself, but I’m sure many others have not considered how their data will be affected.  They assume that their provider has everything in place to ensure their data is safe, but what about a major disaster such as this one – how will it affect their business?  What guarantees do they have that things won’t have problems?

So, this morning I setup an FTP server in my office here, and configured ImageManager on my webserver to use the Remote Site Replication feature. The Remote Site Replication is a feature of ImageManager Enterprise which is basically just a license key you need to purchase from StorageCraft and you can then activate it easily.  As we speak I have the ShadowProtect Images streaming down to my office.  Once the 18GB of data gets here, I’ll not only have an offsite backup, but through the use of VirtualBoot technology, I’ll be able to get my server up and running within minutes here in my office, and then all I need to do is change the DNS records for www.sbsfaq.com to point here and I’m back on the air.

Having said all the above – I really hope that the people of Queensland suffer no more with this and that all my friends and family up that way stay safe.