Thursday 23 February 2012

AWS conference

Just attended the AWS conference in London today to hear all about the new features Amazon are rolling out.  There are large number of initiatives to makes things easier and also to lock you into Amazon every more tightly.  From a disaster recovery point of view I liked the CC2 high computer instance that could have a 10GB Ethernet connect which coupled with the direct connect 10GB pipe allows you transfer roughly 1TB an hour directly to the data centre in Dublin.

My neighbour gave me a couple of interesting real  world disaster recovery stories where things had gone wrong.  The first was a typical scrip based backup to an offsite recovery site.  The problem was that the script had failed about six months before the disaster so when it was needed there was no backed up data.

The other example of preparation for a disaster recovery that went wrong was where the latest data was backed up regularly to CD and then the CD's were stored regularly in a fireproof save.  Come the disaster, the discs were all found to be blank.  It just goes to show how important actually testing your recovery process is.