Disaster Recovery (DR) Plan

Disaster Recovery

•       No single feature provides disaster recovery within a SharePoint Server 2010 environment

•       Few Approaches to make Application available when a data center goes offline, including the following:

•       Cold DR - Offsite storage of backups, both within and outside your region.

•       Warm DR - Shipping images of servers to offsite locations after certain Interval.

•       Hot DR - Running multiple data centers, but serving data only through one, keeping the others available on standby

System Center Data Protection Manager 2010 – Tool for Backup/Recovery

• Recovery of SharePoint sites, document libraries, lists and documents to either the original server location or an alternate SharePoint farm.
• Unified Protection for Disk, Tape, and Cloud
• Item level recovery for SharePoint 2010 without a SharePoint recovery farm
• Automatic detection of deleted content databases from a protected SharePoint farm
• Support for moving content databases between instances
• Auto-Heal and Retry for Failed Backups
• DPM 2010 seamlessly interacts with the SharePoint and SQL Server Volume Shadow Copy Services (VSS) writers so that DPM captures consistent versions of a SharePoint deployment without interrupting client access to SharePoint content
• Recovery of SharePoint content stored on SharePoint 2010 farms without requiring the use of a recovery farm

Recommendations – Backup Strategy

• Scheduling Backups

• For Ad hoc changes backup whenever modified

• Storage – SAN, SATA, Tape drive
• Backup of Virtual images of Servers - Monthly

Recovery Strategy – 1 (using SharePoint)

• Restore from a farm backup that was created by using built-in tools, or restore from the backup of a component taken by using the farm backup system.
• Restore from a site collection backup.
• Connect to a content database by using the unattached content database feature, back up or export data from it, and then restore or import the data
• Restore Customizations (http://technet.microsoft.com/hi-in/library/ee748613(en-us).aspx)

Recovery Strategy – 2 (using System Center DPM 2010)

System Requirements

In an ideal scenario, the failover components and systems match the primary components and systems in all ways:

• Platform, hardware, and number of servers.

At a minimum, the failover environment must be able to handle the traffic that you expect during a failover.

Keep in mind that only a subset of users may be served by the failover site.

The systems must match in at least the following:

•    Operating system version and all updates
•    SQL Server versions and all updates
•    SharePoint 2010 Products versions and all updates

The system uptime will also be affected by the other components in the system. In particular, make sure that you do the following:

• Ensure that infrastructure dependencies such as power, cooling, network, directory, and SMTP are fully redundant.
• Choose a switching mechanism, whether DNS or hardware load balancing, that meets your needs.

References: 

•http://eval.symantec.com/mktginfo/enterprise/fact_sheets/b-be2010_agent_sharepoint_solution_brief.en-us.pdf

•http://symcdata.info/vmworld/assets/BE-2010-R2.pdf

•http://www.edugeek.net/blogs/zag/455-microsoft-dpm-2010-vs-symantec-backup-exec-2010.html