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1.  

   

   Brenden, Nov 26th, 2003 @ 8:22am

   
   

   DR Failure

   I've heard studies that show that most disaster recovery plans don't usually work. The simple reason for this is that the plans never get tested until an actual disaster happens. I've seen it happen at my company. We had a hard drive fail on a server a couple of times and it slowed down productivity for many employees. This server has a RAID array and worse yet after the first crash the IT manager added a backup hard drive that didn't improve the situation. It is my belief that this could have been avoided through simple testing, but our IT manager still hasn't done any tests to see if he has fixed the problem. This is due to him not wanting to spend the time or the desire to test it and others above him to not realize the potential severity of the problem.

    

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2.  

   

   Oliver Wendell Jones, Nov 26th, 2003 @ 11:00am

   
   

   Not all companies

   While I generally don't like the IT support at the company I work at (I work in R&D and am not part of the 'general IT' infrastructure), I have to admit that we do have one heck of a disaster recovery plan.
   
   We have offsite locations set up to almost immediately spring into action to cover the 1-800 support phone lines, and an offsite data center on other side of the continent to handle interruptions to the network side of things. We even have an onsite power generator station that runs at 50% load at all times (we sell the excess power back to the local utility company) and an underground storage tank of something like a million gallons of fresh water.
   
   They routinely test these systems and announce ahead of time that there may be some interruptions in service while the test is underway, but I have yet to see a single incident where we were offline for more than 5 minutes.
   
   We have had incidents of major outages or evacuations (a nearby chemical company had a huge spill producing a cloud of nasty green gas a while back) and I'd be willing to bet that our customers never even knew.

    

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3.  

   

   AMetamorphosis, Nov 26th, 2003 @ 12:02pm

   
   

   Re: Not all companies

   Oliver,
   I have to agree with you that the company I work for has one hell of a disaster recovery plan. We supply Help Desk support for many large corporations and our business would tank if we didn't. We have generators, 3 different service providers for internet access & numerous off site locations that have duplicate data. In the two years I have worked here I have never once seen our service go down. My company may have its problems but when it comes to IT disaster recovery, this place is head & shoulders above 99.9% of other places I've worked for.

    

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