Disaster recovery...

Recently we were asked to present disaster recovery plans for different parts of IT, business intelligence and reporting group was one of them. There are lots of approaches to disaster recovery, it starts from backups for databases and runs all the way upto bringing up a failover server when the primary server crashes. These plans should be an integral part of oragnisation and should not be made as after thought. One of the approaches we took as recovery plan for our reporting database servers was that we had a failover server. This server was configured exactly as the primary server in terms of memory,space and databases. Apart from the regular database backups which were being done on the primary server, we also had to make sure that the failover server can perform as the production server in times of disaster. We did not choose log shipping or database mirroring in this case, instead we ran the same processes in parallel on both the primary and failover servers. This approach worked the best for our situation. One of the tasks we had to make sure happened also maintain the standard databases required for SSRS reporting, since these databases contains the report databases catalog. One of the key issues to be made part of the disaster recovery plan is to include items like how quickly can the failover server be up and running for the regular operations to continue.