The do-it-yourself must-ask list

The do-it-yourself must-ask list

Thanks to virtualization, many companies will be doing their own disaster recovery for the first time. Start with these basic questions:

• How will you inform key people of the disaster and get information to employees in the affected area?

• Who grabs the configuration documentation before getting on the airplane?

• Where do you keep backups of configuration documentation, and how do you access those?

• Which IT members go to the back-up site, and which stay behind to work on the failed systems?

• What is the plan for failing back, once the disaster is over and the data center can be used again?

• Where will employees work while the primary site is unavailable, and how will they access IT systems?

• Have you tested all applications to work with the failover systems? If configuration changes have occurred, have applications been tested again?

• Who is assigned what tasks for getting the failover site fully operational?

• What SAN has the synchronized data and how will failover occur to it?

• How do your database, server cluster or virtualized servers synchronize, and who is responsible for verifying that an accurate synchronization has occurred?

• What is the plan for failing over to the second site if the network connections in the region have been affected by the disaster?

• Where are the long-term restore tapes, and who is responsible for getting them?

• Has all older equipment functioning as disaster backups been kept up to date with patches and testing?