Five Easy and Straight-forward Tips To Protect Your Data and Save Your Day

IT directors avoid the task of looking into their business continuity plan on the understanding it is a larger task than it actually is. 

To quell this myth, I will go through the top five tips to ensure data protection, and so business continuity.

The first tip is real time antivirus scanning. It is important to know if you are using antivirus on your servers and if it is enabled for real time scanning. You may want to consider disabling it for scanning any type of backup operation or real time replication as it can hinder and disrupt optimal data performance.

The next tip is to make some general network considerations. You want to make sure you are receiving the right speeds across the entire network. You also need to ensure there are not high latency periods between your networks and you may want to analyse any auto-negotiated networks that you have to ensure you are receiving full duplex networking versus half duplex networking.

The third tip is target server preparations to ensure the right operating system is installed on the target, that your target applications have been installed in the identical location and configured just like your appropriate source location. Unless, of course, you are using our system state recovery products, in which there is no need to prepare any type of target applications.

The fourth are to cover is general server health. You need to look at basic performance tuning to ensure the server is not operating over the minimum recommendation for performance on that particular piece of the server. You also need to consider updating your drivers. Make sure your drivers are running the latest versions, service packs, hot fixes for your applications and your operating systems, and when was the last time you looked at your event logs? Make sure the applications are not reporting any errors or warnings through the systems as they run.

The last tip is scheduled reboots; it is a great operational practice to reboot your servers from time to time. It is also a good idea to reboot your servers before and after any application install as a reboot is just a great way to valuate general server health.

This article was contributed by Derek Cheek, senior solutions architect for Double-Take professional services group.

Tags: Backup, Business Continuity, server