Creating a Comprehensive, Budget-friendly Disaster Recovery Plan

MOUNTAIN VIEW, Calif., May 2, 2011 /PRNewswire/ -- Because many companies streamlined operations during the recent economic crisis and have yet to increase budgets back to pre-recession levels, many IT professionals are faced with the fundamental challenge of creating comprehensive disaster recovery plans without exceeding their often "shoestring" budgets.

To ensure that your disaster recovery plan meets your business' needs, it's important to determine how specific data and applications impact your business. Once analyzed, you can prioritize the data and applications, specify the amount of downtime that will be tolerated for each tier and create a stair-stepped approach to their recovery.

With this system in mind, Symantec recommends following disaster recovery strategies:

• Ensure application recovery. Because application environments are becoming increasingly complex, recovering them manually is often difficult and costly. To mitigate these problems, Symantec recommends clustering, which allows file systems to run on parallel servers and eliminates the need for storage resources to be restarted during a failover.
• Optimize information recovery. Applications are rendered useless without information, so to optimize your company's information recovery, it's often best to use disk-based data protection. Not only will it help increase backup and recovery success rates, but it takes mere minutes, as opposed to the hours (or days) often needed for tape. In addition, disk-based data protection also provides granular recovery, which allows companies to back up and store applications once but have two types of recovery: the full application/image for disaster recovery purposes, as well as granular files, objects, or emails, which can be particularly helpful in e-discovery.
• Deduplication and Archiving. Through the use of deduplication, companies can reduce backup requirements, eliminate multiple copies of the same data, realize savings through the efficient use of storage and get faster backup and recovery. Archiving can complement deduplication by allowing companies to move less-often used information from a high-cost disk to lower-cost storage solution.

With a global economy that operates 24 hours a day, seven days a week, an appropriate and reliable disaster recovery plan is critical. Symantec offers best-in-class tools designed to ensure business continuity, such as NetBackup, NetBackupPureDisk, NetBackupRealTime, Cluster Server and Backup Exec, as well as information management consulting services designed to help businesses find the right solutions to meet their needs and their budget.  

For complete details on Symantec's disaster recovery tools and services, please visit http://www.symantec.com/business/solutions/solutiondetail.jsp?solid=sol_business_cont&solfid=sol_disaster_recovery.

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SOURCE Symantec