Backup and Recovery Goals
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@scottalanmiller said:
@DustinB3403 said:
@coliver said:
Are the RTO and RPO goals set by you? Or are they set by management?
By me and having heard management say we can't live with more. Not my call to argue with them, that's my bosses job.
A financial person working for the CFO's office should be making sure RTO and RPO are never said on the planning stages (see the other thread before this one from @Dashrender where I mentioned why RTO and RPO can't be used in planning because it leas to disaster.) The financial people should understand intrinsically that reducing risk and the cost to do so are a sliding scale and it is always an assessment based on a combination of the two and any statement of RTO or RPO desires is just crazy. Hopefully even junior financial people are available to assist you if the CFO is too busy to make sure that managers never make this kind of mistake.
How do you pick a starting point without setting an objective, even if it is just a starting point.
What other objectives would you prefer to use to base a design on?
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@Dashrender said:
How do you pick a starting point without setting an objective, even if it is just a starting point.
This is a mental exercise. I will guess that you are a perceiver, like me. I cannot handle an ambiguous starting point and need someone else, a planner, to set an objective and then I can say "that makes no sense, let's adjust to this..." but I cannot provide the starting point on my own.
This is a mental deficiency that we share. What we need is someone who is a planner. Someone who can set that goal for us to tweak.
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@Dashrender said:
What other objectives would you prefer to use to base a design on?
You don't, you build a curve and adjust the spending up or down until you find the mix of risk and of cost that is best for your specific business.
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This is purely a financial exercise and not an IT one. IT people are not trained to understand this or make this decision. This is for the CFO and his team. The IT perspective here is to provide info to create the graph.
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@scottalanmiller said:
@Dashrender said:
How do you pick a starting point without setting an objective, even if it is just a starting point.
This is a mental exercise. I will guess that you are a perceiver, like me. I cannot handle an ambiguous starting point and need someone else, a planner, to set an objective and then I can say "that makes no sense, let's adjust to this..." but I cannot provide the starting point on my own.
This is a mental deficiency that we share. What we need is someone who is a planner. Someone who can set that goal for us to tweak.
Yes, we share that in common.
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@Dashrender said:
Yes, we share that in common.
Lots of IT people are. Perceiving is an important skill for doing good triage. Just one of those life tricks, learning to find a planner to be your compliment.
I'm lucky that I have @art_of_shred at work and @dominica at home who are both strong planners to do that side of things and they have me for perception roles.
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@scottalanmiller said:
This is purely a financial exercise and not an IT one. IT people are not trained to understand this or make this decision. This is for the CFO and his team. The IT perspective here is to provide info to create the graph.
OK, this is true to a point, maybe a greater one that I'd like to admit.
But referencing Darren's CEO/CFO talk at SpiceWorld, IT presents options to management, sometimes for homegrown projects. For management provided projects it's pretty easy, as they should be providing the starting point to help IT get the graph started. An IT homegrown project requires the start to come from within, and probably really also requires them to find the financial side as well.
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@Dashrender said:
@scottalanmiller said:
This is purely a financial exercise and not an IT one. IT people are not trained to understand this or make this decision. This is for the CFO and his team. The IT perspective here is to provide info to create the graph.
OK, this is true to a point, maybe a greater one that I'd like to admit.
But referencing Darren's CEO/CFO talk at SpiceWorld, IT presents options to management, sometimes for homegrown projects. For management provided projects it's pretty easy, as they should be providing the starting point to help IT get the graph started. An IT homegrown project requires the start to come from within, and probably really also requires them to find the financial side as well.
I don't think that it should, even for IT-initiated projects (we can discuss why IT should probably not initiate many projects in general elsewhere.) IT just lacks the info and power here. The management or financial teams should have some resource somewhere to help with things. This is difficult to explain in a purely abstract way. Can you think of an example where you feel that IT would need to provide a starting point?
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OK back to Dustin's project.
So, for a starting point, an RTO of 1 day.
With that in mind, I'd go for a single server with a 2 hour response (2 hour response does not mean 2 hour repair)
Enough RAM to cover everything
Either 2 TB 7200 SAS drives in RAID 10 or 1 TB SSD drives in RAID 5 (8 TB per previous discussion, currently using 6 TB)That should traditionally fit in the RTO of one day for a normal failure.
Backups
Second server, virtualized
Probably RAID 6 with 24 - 32 TB of disk to allow for 4 full system backups at full capacity. Although, with StorageCraft, this can probably be significantly lowered using synthetic full backups/incrementals.Considerations:
8 port 10 GigE switch with 10GigE in each server. Could probably be done with bonded 1 GigE ports instead, minimum of two per server. -
@Dashrender I am doing everything in my power to avoid Spinning Rust. The original proposal I made includes SSDs in RAID 5, 8TB in total.
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Sounds like it's time to ask for a sit down with your boss and the CIO/CFO. Explain your plan, explain the MSP's plan, why your's is better (not only in cost but in function).
If they don't buy off at that time, you've done all you can. I hate to say it, at that point let it go. I know - I can never let it go at that point either.
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@scottalanmiller I was kinda hopin' for your thoughts on the suggested setup considering what we know.
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@DustinB3403 said:
@Dashrender I am doing everything in my power to avoid Spinning Rust. The original proposal I made includes SSDs in RAID 5, 8TB in total.
Have you run something like a Dell Dpack to actually see how many IOPS you are using to know if you really will see any benefit from SSDs?
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No, there's no need. We have nothing we "host" onsite that is IOPS intensive
But even with SSD's the price is still cheaper then what we've been quoted from others.
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@Dashrender said:
Something to keep in mind. While every business wants as little downtime as possible and as little data lose as possible, while they may start with that goal, and give the times listed above, once you provide them numbers that provide that level of service, they may come back and change their minds and lower these requirements (i.e. make them longer).
Maybe with down time, but not so much loss of data, especially if you are a publicly traded company where you can not lose any data and have required data retention periods.
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@DustinB3403 said:
The primary file ....... The server simply shares out the attached stored.
That's the case with any file server.
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@Jason said:
@Dashrender said:
Something to keep in mind. While every business wants as little downtime as possible and as little data lose as possible, while they may start with that goal, and give the times listed above, once you provide them numbers that provide that level of service, they may come back and change their minds and lower these requirements (i.e. make them longer).
Maybe with down time, but not so much loss of data, especially if you are a publicly traded company where you can not lose any data and have required data retention periods.
Is there such a thing as zero data loss potential?
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@Dashrender said:
@Jason said:
@Dashrender said:
Something to keep in mind. While every business wants as little downtime as possible and as little data lose as possible, while they may start with that goal, and give the times listed above, once you provide them numbers that provide that level of service, they may come back and change their minds and lower these requirements (i.e. make them longer).
Maybe with down time, but not so much loss of data, especially if you are a publicly traded company where you can not lose any data and have required data retention periods.
Is there such a thing as zero data loss potential?
Isn't that the dream?
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@Dashrender said:
Is there such a thing as zero data loss potential?
Next to it when you have change monitoring, not just scheduled backups.
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@DustinB3403 said:
The primary file server is directly connected to the Buffalo drive. The server simply shares out the attached stored.
The primary DC has multiple functions on it, Spiceworks, AD, and 2 network shares.
The 3rd server is acting as a HyperV host for 0365 / AD integration and a Reporting server.
That's an odd way to do it. I'd take the Spiceworks off the DC for sure and put in on the server with the o365 Azure sync. File server is better separate from a DC too.
