Disaster Recovery

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Latest revision as of 21:18, 24 February 2011

Comet Disaster Recovery

© 2009 Signature System Inc.

For installation instructions and other documentation, please refer to the Disaster Recovery Manual.

The Comet Disaster Recovery Service provides a comprehensive solution for your business continuity plan.

These days, it is becoming more and more important to have a plan in case something at your business site should fail. Whether it's a full-blown disaster like an earthquake, tornado, flood or fire, or simply a server or hard disk failure - how are you prepared to continue your business? Often, people turn to tape backups and off-site storage, but sometimes this just isn't enough. Can you afford to spend a day, two, or a week recovering your hardware and data only to find out the tape was corrupt?

The Comet Disaster Recovery Service uses CometAnywhere technology to duplicate your existing comet data and programs on a remote server - providing a redundant system that can be initialized quickly in case of a disaster. By making automated, periodic updates to the remote server, you are insured that if something happens to your local system, there is an up-to-date and physically distinct remote system capable of resuming normal business operation with minimal downtime.

Normal Operation

Each day, at a time you choose, all of the changes to your data files is transmitted securely to one of signature system's servers. It is then made available for your testing to make sure all was duplicated successfully.

What happens when a disaster strikes?

In the event of a disaster, once Signature Systems is notified, we will immediately increase the number of users and sessions for your account. At this time your users can log into the server with Comet Anywhere in order to continue their work remotely. You will be able to get to all of your data immediately and even be able to perform basic business tasks. We will be there, working side by side with you to work through any issues you have and help you recover. Once new hardware is in place, we will send a copy of all your data and programs back to you, which should put you right back in business.

Features

• Redundant: In case of a disaster, you have a copy of your comet infrastructure available to run all of your business operations.

• Up-to-date: Periodic updates (nightly) are made by your server to the Comet Backup server in order to keep the most current version of programs and data available.

• Easy Verification: Simply log into our remote Comet server like you would your own to run your programs and verify that the system is current. We will provide you with the appropriate shortcuts for your desktop. If something goes wrong with the backup process, both you and Signature are notified by email of the failure.

• Low Overhead: No tape drives, no special programs. The service is run by a simple script on your server – everything else is hosted by Signature Systems. Once the server is initialized, only the changed files are transmitted to the server, dramatically shortening the transmission time.

• Secure: Our servers are located in northern California behind card-locked doors with modern cooling, fire suppression, backup power, and on-site personnel 24/7. Your data is encrypted during transmission to and from our server so that Internet eavesdropping is virtually impossible.

• Performance: Our servers are located in a collocation facility with multiple 100MB pathways to the internet. For CometAnywhere connections, your performance will be dependant on the speed of your Internet connection. You can test the speed yourself by using CometAnywhere to log into cc.signature.net. You will be prompted for a user name and password. Use "guest" for both. Ask your developer for the names of programs to run to test both disk and screen performance.

• Capacity: We currently have one server dedicated to this function. This server can be configured with over 800 sessions. We have another seven servers which could be used for disaster recovery if needed.

Reference

Coraggio Textiles has been using the Disaster Recovery Service since April of 2009. Every morning (Tuesday through Saturday) their backup process starts automatically at 2am, which compresses around 800 Megabytes of updated data files into an archive of about 100 Megabytes. The archive is then transferred to the Signature Systems server and unpacked by 2:30am.

Coraggio has around 20 comet users and 20 comet anywhere users, and is able to perform their daily backup usually within 30 minutes. Once the remote system has been updated, they are free to log in via CometAnywhere and check if the files are up to date.

Questions

How does this differ from off-site backup?

We believe EVERY business needs some sort of off site backup. We have never trusted tape backup because we have seen too many cases where the data restore failed. In some cases we have seen business go bankrupt because of this. Most off site backup services do only that. They are not a business continuity solution. For that reason, they cost less. With any of them, you are responsible for restoring the data to another system, and re-establishing your software before business can resume. Check out the following providers:

• Carbonite.com
• IronMountain.com
• ibackup.com
• dataprotection.com
• offsitebackupsolutions.com

Or just google "offsite backup".

What does it Cost?

• There is an initial fee that covers setting up our servers and setting up the backup process. This includes establishing the initial state of all of your data files on our server.
• Then there is a monthly fee associated with the service. This covers the cost of 2 comet sessions and transfer of up to 8 GB per month.
• If more than 8 GB are transferred per month there may be an additional minimal fee associated with Signature's out of pocket cost for the bandwidth increase.
• Please contact your developer for exact pricing information.
• Then check with your insurance carrier. There may be a substantial discount on your business continuity insurance that may even more than cover the cost of the Comet Disaster Recovery Service.