What Are Your Options to Recover Your Servers?

credit union disaster server recovery

So, you have a disaster. What are your credit union server recovery options?

Take a deep breath. Sure, things aren’t going well right now. Maybe your SAN died. Maybe a server isn’t booting. Maybe you have malware. Whatever the reason, stress is high and everyone at your credit union is watching your every move.

Of course, you have a business continuity or disaster recovery plan. But, what did it say again? What do you recover first? Well, this post won’t answer all of those questions, but it will help you understand the pros and cons of your recovery options. Read on to learn more.

Credit Union Server Recovery Options

The first thing you should do: go pull up your Business Impact Analysis or Last Disaster Recovery test and see what your notes say. Credit union dr test from ongoing operationsAlso, take a look at your Incident Response Plan if this is a security breach or physical disaster.

Ongoing Operations clients have one of two types of offsite backups.

Option 1 – Replicator V3

This is a software agent that creates regular 15-minute incremental snapshots locally, aggregates them, and then sends them offsite to the Ongoing Operations data centers.

Option 2 – Replicator V4.

This is a VMWare or virtual server-based solution that captures the changes from every server and sends them offsite instantly.

(Read more about the differences between Replicator V3 and Replicator V4 here.)

Credit unions that don’t work with Ongoing Operations have other offsite backup options

Other options include tape-based backups, SAN to SAN backups, and many other choices. For the purpose of this blog, we will be focused on Ongoing Operations options.

How to Recovery Servers After Disaster

So, what are your recovery options now that you need to recover? If you’re using the Ongoing Operations Replicator solution, you have four options.

  1. Recover from the last known good option. Microsoft OS-based servers have an option for when your server crashed. Maybe it was a patch, or maybe you rebooted and it didn’t come back. Either way, your first option is to recover from your last known good hardware configuration.
    • Pros: No data loss and fast recovery.
    • Cons: Whatever you did to cause the crash may be essential to moving things forward. You might need to backup a critical upgrade or patch.
  1. If the issue is from data corruption or something else, check to see if you can boot up from the C: or root drive. Then use Replicator V3 to recover and mount the corrupted disks.
    • Pros: Faster than a full recovery.
    • Cons: If you have OS or C: or Root Drive corruption, this solution won’t work.
  1. Full Recovery with Replicator V3. If your hardware, SAN, or some other issue is causing you pain, you may need to do a full recovery. That might take two forms—either run Replicator V3 locally or recover directly into the Ongoing Operations cloud farm. The Replicator V3 solution is here for you. You can restore the full root or C: drive and all of the other drives directly.
    • Pros: We should be able to recover you and encrypt your data. Your RPO (recovery point objective) should be less than an hour, resulting in little to no data loss. We also offer many options for recovery points in past weeks or months. This is great if you had corruption or a breach and want to get back to a clean state.
    • Cons: Depending on the size and number of servers, this might take a few hours to a day to recover everything. You might lose the last few transactions or changes to your servers or applications.
  1. Fast, full recovery with Replicator V4. Replicator V4 will allow you to fail over the server within minutes to the Ongoing Operations VMWare farm.
    • Pros: You can recover in minutes with very little if any data loss. You can recover to a good point within the last 5 days.
    • Cons: If you need to recover from prior to 5 days you’re in trouble (unless you also have Replicator V3).

Generally, it is Ongoing Operations’ advice that you should let us know the second you believe you have a catastrophic issue. We can begin recovering servers and readying them for you even if it takes you a few hours to make a decision.

Once you have decided your recovery path, you won’t regret the time we spent recovering your servers. If you don’t end up failing over, no worries! You just completed a current disaster recovery test.

So, take a deep breath, check your plans, prioritize your options, and prepare multiple recovery options (aka hedge your bets).

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