Many business owners and “less technical” people in management think “data backups” are enough to protect their organization. But when an outage occurs from equipment failure the recovery can be painful and take far longer than expected.

Think about a dual disk failure in a physical server.  

First, you need to get the hardware repaired or parts replaced.  Do you have spare disks and a power supply?  Do you have access to parts and service quickly?  If you don’t have a hardware service/support plan, this can take several days to remedy.

After your hardware is repaired or replaced, you need to locate your Operating System license key and install the OS.  After the base OS is installed, it needs patches, lots of them.  Sometimes the patch load requires multiple reboots and several hours to download and install.  Now that the OS is up, you have to look at all services and applications that this Operating System Environment (OSE) supported before it failed, and activate/reinstall the services and apps required.  Whew, that was a lot of work.  The bare metal recovery of one server can take several hours.  Now that the server is recovered, you are ready to restore the data from backups.

Is the time to recover a physical server unacceptable?  There are ways to provide far better application agility, you just need to do some planning.  For more information about reducing your downtime, contact us.  To estimate your downtime cost, try our Cost of Downtime Calculator.