Minor Test of Storage Snapshots Post-Disaster

[Michael D.]

As many of you already know we experienced a major disaster at the end of September where we were forced to restore data from a backup server due to a misconfiguration of snapshots on our storage platform. Since this disaster we resolved the snapshot issue and today we were able to use the snapshots to help a client and we couldn't be happier with the experience.

 

We had a client today that had an employee submit a cancellation for services that shouldn't have been canceled. The result was 43 accounts terminated that shouldn't have been.

 

In the past normally what we'd have done is turned to our backup server, which takes backups once per day, and restored the latest point we could. This could have been as far as 24 hours prior to the termination of services.

 

What we did as it would give more recent data to the client as well as give us a good test of working with snapshots - was to mount a snapshot of the server just prior to the termination of the services. We booted the server up, generated backups for the accounts which was exceptionally fast due to the SSD storage, and then restored those backups to the live server.

 

In the event of an actual disaster we'd simply mount the snapshots and boot them up without doing any backups or restorations and services would immediately come back online as they were when the snapshot was taken.

 

All in all we're very happy with this as we were able to provide more recent data to the client than otherwise would have been possible much faster than normally would have been possible.

 

The process was extremely simple and straightforward. While we don't ever plan on needing snapshots for disaster recovery it is good to know that if we did - they are available and work very well for that purpose.

[SarisIsop]

Good to know.