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Eric Kung

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DR site best practices

Hello experts, please help. We are in the pre-study stage for our DR Site. We are located at Los Angeles, so we need a hot site in Las Vegas or Phoenix. We need to replicate our AD, Exchange, SQL and file server. We are using NetApp for Exchange, SQL and file server. Total of 6TB data, rate of change is around 3%. We have 2 4xT1, no MPLS.

1.Is there any good step by step best practices document? From how to choose DR site and connections to what hardware and software we need to implement.
2.Any good DR site consultants in Los Angeles?
3.Should we pick Las Vegas or Phoenix? Any suggestions for collocation in Las Vegas and Phoenix?
4.What kind the connection we need between our site to DR site? And how to calculate this?

That’s all the questions I can think of for now, can you share your experience to setup your DR site? Thanks in advance.
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if you are really concerned about DR you can look into companies that have thier datacenters underground!!!
Some additional things that you need to do are
1. Document your disaster recovery procedure for each application
2  Setup up a regular schedule - at least once a year - where you simulate a disaster and validate that your procedures work.  
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Also, in my opinion, you should ask a manager about the business continuity objectives and the business continuity plan. if he's unable to provide you that, there isn't a plan for BCP and DR. The Management should look at business risks and technical risks and should be able to make the main BCP, take the following points/questions inconsideration:

- During the course of a disaster or significant disruption, does your organization have written plans for business continuity and IT disaster recovery?
- Do the established plans cover critical business functions with recovery priorities?
- Have you performed a business impact analysis including Recovery Time Objective and Recovery Point Objective?
- Do you have a dedicated team of professionals focused on business continuity and/or IT disaster recovery?
- Is senior management fully committed to disaster recovery and business continuity?
- Are your disaster recovery costs, options, and disaster declaration procedures understandable?
- Is your business continuity plan updated regularly to keep it current with hardware, software, business and staffing changes?
- Is there remote accessibility to your disaster recovery center?
- Has your plan been tested for the possibility of facility loss?
- Does your organization have a documented crisis management process?
- What is your organization recovery strategy? Hot Sites, Warm Sites, Cold sites ..etc.
- Do you have written backup and archive procedures?
- Do you have industry-standard back-up solutions? (media, tape, drives, library, software etc.)
- Do you periodically test your back-up media?
- Does your current backup and recovery methodology fulfill management’s business uptime needs?
- make sure your disaster recovery costs, options, and disaster declaration procedures understandable..
- make sure you have a sufficient budget to support your disaster recovery program..
- make sure to test your plan using a worst-case scenarios..
-If you do Replication, means that deletions and corruptions and accidental will all get replicated, so
the best practice for a mission critical system is to have an online replication to DR site to site, additionally daily backup onsite backup and daily offsite backup (on tapes).
...etc

For DR/BCP solution I would suggest that you get help from your Business Partner(IBM/CISCO/HP/DELL/Juniper...etc.)

http://www.redbooks.ibm.com/abstracts/tips0340.html
http://www-03.ibm.com/systems/business_resiliency/
http://www.ibm.com/itsolutions/disaster-recovery/
http://www-01.ibm.com/software/success/cssdb.nsf/hardwareL2VW?OpenView&Count=30&RestrictToCategory=corp_StorageDS8100&cty=en_us
http://www-01.ibm.com/software/tivoli/products/storage-mgr/
http://www.drj.com/
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