Catastrophes and contingencies

Bio-IT World - For years, companies have prepared for the worst. And that was before Sept. 11, 2001. In the wake of that tragedy, perceptions of how to safeguard corporate data have changed. The lessons learned from the World Trade Center catastrophe have formed the blueprints that life science companies must adopt to ensure survival after a disaster.

The key shift in disaster-recovery planning since Sept. 11 is termed business continuance planning, which builds upon the time-honored, back-up-everything-on-tape disaster-recovery method.

In the event of a disaster, business continuance planning looks for ways to quickly restore day-to-day operations and prevent the loss of critical company data. Business continuance planning also strives to improve the efficiency of normal day-to-day operations, providing methods to smooth out small glitches that can lead to loss of data, productivity, or business.

While backing up data to tapes that are stored securely offsite remains essential, business continuance planning relies on additional methods to facilitate disaster recovery.

Data mirroring—where data are replicated to a second live data center—is a crucial component of a thorough business continuance plan. The idea is to have a copy of all vital data online at a second site. This does not preclude backing up the data to tapes—indeed, the combination of mirroring and tape backup inspires confidence that no data will be lost in a major disaster.

"Backing data up to tapes on a daily basis is still our safety net, but we were concerned that the time required to retrieve data from offsite storage after a major disaster would be significant," says David O'Neill, network administrator at a specialty drug manufacturer, which O'Neill did not want named. "That's one reason we looked at replicating data to multiple sites. It ensures that data are always available to our staff."

But data mirroring is not cheap. "Tapes are still relatively inexpensive compared to disk drives," O'Neill says. "Data mirroring requires almost double the disk space as is required to store the original data."

One approach to data mirroring is real-time data replication to offsite storage devices, which has the advantage of virtually no data loss if the primary site is out of commission. The downside, however, is that moving large files—medical images, for example—throughout the business day could clog WAN connections and retard applications that access the data. Alternatively, data can be copied to offsite storage systems during down times, when network usage is not as high.

In either case, technology can help expedite the data transfer process. Data caching and compression are commonly applied to files before offsite transfers. Products from companies such as Peribit Networks Inc. reduce the amount of data that needs to be sent between two locations. Peribit's tools use algorithms that search data for patterns and build tables that store identifying labels. Any time the same patterns are detected after the labeling process takes place, only the labels (and not the actual data) are transmitted to the secondary site.