CASE STUDY
Disaster Recovery Solutions
A Threat From Within
An IT disaster can impair your performance and capabilties
About the Client
The client is a global businessto-business agency with over 600
employees. Plan B, a specialist disaster
recovery company, looks after all
advertising imagery for this client, which
is one of their most valuable assets and
totals 12TB of data, predominantly on
one large file server. Plan B minimises
the risk of IT downtime by prerecovering and testing their systems
every 24 hours, offering a hot standby
equivalent in a virtual environment.
This offers them the fastest return to
service of all virtual DR companies at a
lower cost.
The Disaster
One morning Plan B received a call
from a member of the technical team.
They had lost around 8TB of data and
needed it back quickly. The best way
to achieve this was to invoke the Plan
B recovery platform, as data transfer
times for 8TB, even to disc, were
estimated at days rather than hours.
The initial diagnosis by the client was a
virus, however a further 3TB had gone
‘missing’ during the invocation process,
leading the Plan B technical team to
suspect the cause was closer to home.
This was because the deletions were
different: the first a disc deletion and
the second by a disc being reformatted.
Agreeing the cause of the missing
data could be an internal threat, staff
were asked to leave the building and
admin domain passwords changed.
Unfortunately the root cause of the
trauma had not been completely
resolved by the change in admin
domain passwords as the SAN admin
passwords were not changed and the
perpetrator managed to delete some of
the LUNs on the SAN.
The Recovery
Plan B booted up the client’s
pre-recovered system and within just
a few minutes of the initial call it was
fully available to the client. Due to the
nature of the problem, a high level call
was made to the parent company in the
USA to establish who could be trusted
to handle the recovered system. It was
only on their authority that we made
their system available to the Head of
IT only.
The plan going forward was to
restore the client’s servers from the Plan
B appliance rather than give employees
access to the rescue platform. Because
of the amounts of data involved, this
was a very lengthy process so the Head
of IT manually provided information
to employees. As a safety net, in parallel
to this it was agreed that Plan B start
restoring the 12TB of data onto an
‘export server’ so that it could be
physically couriered to site and deployed
as a replacement to the original server.
This would cover them if the initial data
restoration took too long.
This process took 8 days over
the Christmas break to right to disc
(demonstrating how long they would
have been without their systems if
they didn’t use Plan B’s Pre-recovery
service). It was fully tested and shipped
to the customer where the Head of IT
took receipt and installed it, providing
a standalone local access of files while
the data restoration to the newly built
servers continued.
At the start of the New Year service
An external provider is much better suited to handle IT disasters
32 NETCOMMS europe Volume V Issue 3 2015
www.netcommseurope.com