Keeping The Data Centre Going Over Christmas - The Importance Of DR, Back-Up And Staffing / Management

Ensuring that you have sufficient staff cover is a good place to start, but you should also check that your disaster recovery providers have made similar suitable provisions.

Stable backup environments that are not affected by changes made elsewhere will be best placed to cope over the holiday period. 

To ensure you are not called as you sit down and tuck into your sprouts, there are a few things a backup administrator will need to check on. Make sure that you have sufficient supplies of empty tapes in your library to tide you over.  

Santa will not be doing a delivery, and there is no place less jolly than a data centre on Christmas day! 

If your standard operating procedures are to remove tapes and ship those off-site regularly ensure that you don’t break your disaster recovery protocols. It may be your tape management providers do not work over the Christmas break. 

If so, determine whether a new process is required. Decisions to leave tapes on-site for an extended period of time should rest with IT management level or above.

Precisely calculate the number of tapes (or free disk capacity) that will be required. Be conscientious that end of year backups could consume more resources than a normal backup cycle and therefore require special considerations.  

Ensure that there will be sufficient staffing levels skilled at the right level to run restores, fix bugs and other problems that may arise. A little planning now will mean that you are able to relax and enjoy the break without worrying about all the “what if” scenarios.