| 3.
Server Environments (continued)
So, how can you reduce
the potential loss of mission critical data?
Well,
there are several options. Here are a few of them:
1.
Redundancy:
Yes, to most Printers that is an ugly word because it means “waste”.
But in the IT industry it means: Install more than one server in your
environment to provide the capability for a quick change if one of them
suffers a “heart attack”.
2.
“Disk
mirroring”: Have more than a single hard-drive in each server and have
the operating system set up to write the same content to both hard-drives
at the same time. That’s why it is called “mirroring” because you
create a mirror image of your data. If one hard-drive dies, the other one
takes over and no data is lost.
3.
“Multi-homed
servers”: Consider having multiple network cards in your server so you
can, if not pre-wired, plug your network cable into the second card if the
first one dies (and that does
happen!).
4.
Backup,
backup, backup: You can never have enough backups! Have a suitable media
available to perform backups of your data. Depending on the criticality,
you may choose to do anything from a daily backup to a live, streamed
mirror copy to backup media. We will talk about backups specifically in
one of the next articles.
(read
on ...)
Copyright (c) 2008 by In Scope-Solutions,
Inc.
|
