Professional Microsoft® SQL Server® 2008 Administration

18.10. Disaster Recovery Planning

Disaster recovery requires considerable planning. A local disaster can cause severe financial loss to the organization. To reduce this, the organization must be able to quickly execute the disaster recovery (DR) plan to bring its systems online. It requires a robust disaster recovery plan and periodic DR drills to ensure that everything will work as planned. Often, organizations have well-intended disaster recovery plans, but they have never tested them for readiness; then, in a real disaster, the plan does not go smoothly. DR planning is based on the specific organization's business requirements, but there are some general areas that need to be addressed to put any plan into action.

Use project management software, such as Microsoft Project, whereby people, resources, hardware, software, and tasks and their completion can be input to provide a systematic approach to managing the tasks, resources, and critical paths. Then develop a checklist of detailed steps for recovery.

Disaster recovery solutions with Windows failover clusters are commonly used to provide hardware redundancy within the data center site and can be configured across data centers by using a more expensive SAN solution to deploy a geographically dispersed Windows failover cluster. Moreover, log shipping and data mirroring can both be inexpensively deployed as disaster recovery solutions. Another solution is SAN replication to maintain a copy of the data in the remote location. ...