The best way to prevent a data center outage is to design your data center from the ground up with redundancy, resiliency, and high availability in mind.
This means having multiple power sources for your equipment and a system that can automatically switch over when one source fails. It also means making sure both sides of your network are redundant.
Data center outages can significantly impact your company's productivity and reputation. While most of us hope for uninterrupted service from our ISPs and cloud service providers, outages are a fact of life. A significant outage can result in millions of dollars in lost revenue and customer goodwill.
Prevention
A data center outage can take many forms, including natural disasters or human error. The best way to prevent these problems from affecting your business is to have a backup power source and a backup generator. If possible, ensure your generator can also run air conditioning if needed.
Data centers must come with redundancy, and one must appropriately maintain their physical infrastructure. Redundancy ensures that if one component fails, another will pick up the slack and keep the data center running smoothly.
Proper maintenance ensures the replacement hardware before it breaks down unexpectedly — which can cause downtime.
Ensure that your cooling systems operate correctly using PRTG Network Monitor and Syslog Analyzer software. These tools will allow you to track temperature levels throughout the network and detect abnormal temperature spikes, which could indicate a cooling problem. If necessary, they can also send alarms when temperatures reach a certain threshold.
Mitigation
When prevention fails, mitigation takes over. Mitigation involves stopping the damage from spreading any further or making it worse than it already is.
For example, if you have a fire in one part of your facility but the sprinklers aren't working correctly, get them fixed immediately before they cause more damage than they're preventing!
You should also have contingency plans for each type of outage at your data center. Hence, you know exactly how to recover from them without causing further damage to your systems or losing important data. Test the plans periodically to see if they'll work in an emergency.
One of the common ways to avoid downtime during a migration is to use replication technology. Replication means that your source server and target server are continuously updated. However, even if you have the image enabled and working correctly, there's still a chance that your application could be unavailable while the servers are syncing.
The best way to do this is using a technology like VMware Site Recovery Manager (SRM). This software-based solution allows you to test your migration plan and ensure it will work as expected before you perform the migration.
Recovery
After mitigation comes recovery, simply putting things back together as quickly as possible so operations can continue as normal.
Recovery is the next step in the recovery process. Recovering from a disaster is often referred to as a disaster recovery plan.
There are two parts to recovery: physical and operational.
Physical recovery involves repairing or rebuilding damaged structures due to the incident, such as roads, buildings, bridges, utility poles, and power lines in your data center infrastructure.
Active recovery involves restoring services such as electricity, water supply, telecommunications, and transportation networks to their regular operation as quickly as possible.
Identify alternative locations where you can run your business if there's an interruption at your primary site.
Your plan should include at least two locations — one local backup site and one remote site — geographically separated by at least 100 miles.
If a significant disaster hits your area, this redundancy will allow you to continue operations while the damage is being repaired or rebuilt at your main facility.
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Conclusion
The best way to ensure that your data center can bear an outage is to be ready. This means having a plan and training your team on what to do in an emergency.
A DR plan should address all aspects of your company's IT systems and physical location, including:
Hardware and software inventory
Data backup and storage locations
Testing procedures
Emergency contact information
To do this, you need to be able to anticipate possible problems, such as power outages or network failures, and plan accordingly.
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