Plan B are delighted to announce that they have recently passed an independent audit for their ISO27001 Information Security Management accreditation.
Plan B were audited by the British Standards Institute in November as part of the continuous assessment requirements of the ISO standard.
Kibble IT grateful of Plan B DR’s recovery solution that ensured its business continuity during an incident
Based in High Wycombe, Kibble IT specialises in pro-active support & maintenance of existing bespoke systems and is adapting to meet ever changing industry demands for household names such as Avis Europe and the BBC.
Kibble incorporates Plan B DR into their operation as part of their business continuity provisions. In the event of a disaster at Kibble, they continue providing client support services using their recovered systems at Plan B.
The Solution
Plan B DR was selected to provide disaster recovery protection for Kibble’s eight servers, covering its core business, email & messaging, file & print, and customer-specific support. In the event of an IT incident, Plan B DR’s service ensures a rapid and complete restoration of running systems on its virtual servers. Setting up the service is designed to be easy. Plan B DR sent Kibble an intelligent snapshotting appliance that plugs into its network and automatically takes copies of its IT systems - without any need for further IT staff assistance or disruption. The image copies are then sent securely to a Plan B DR data centre, where physical to virtual conversion technology ensures that they run on their virtualised servers.
The newly created system images (rescue images) are automatically tested to guarantee, that they will boot up, without trouble in the event of a disaster, and be available for Kibble within 30 minutes.
The Plan B DR appliance also keeps past snapshots as a local backup and can provide very fast file level recovery - in the event of local data corruption or loss. The Plan B DR local backup feature has the added benefit that as the recovery snapshots are tested every day, Kibble can be certain that their backup files on the appliance, are complete and uncorrupted.
Plan B DR’s service was put to the test by Kibble when they requested the recovery of a critical server that had crashed and would not reboot.
Incident Timeline
Monday 12th January 2009
The connections to a piece of Kibble’s core architecture drop. Investigations show a server, which is critical for them to provide their support SLA to their customers, has crashed and refuses to reboot.
12:41 – Kibble contact Plan B Disaster Recovery, and asks for invocation of their service.
12:43 – Plan B Disaster Recovery make contact with Kibble’s authorised Customer DR Authority and establish that an invocation has indeed been requested
12:45 – Plan B Disaster Recovery invoke the recovery process for Kibble’s architecture, selecting (in this case) only the server that was affected by the outage.
13:01 – Plan B invocation is complete and Kibble’s Primary Technical Contact is called to provide VPN login details for the recovery system.
13:12 – Kibble employees who require access to the affected system are able to use SSL VPNs to connect to the affected system and continue their work.
Monday pm
The rebuild was expected to take less than a day, but turned out to be more complicated than expected.
Tuesday – Wednesday
The hardware problems were resolved with on-site replacement parts. Total elapsed time to complete and test was nearly three days. Estimated time to rebuild machine was expected to be less than a day.
Rescue server was switched off on Wednesday evening and Kibble’s repaired server is brought online. Plan B technical staff re-set the service and the appliance returns to protecting the repaired server.
Benefits of the Plan B Service
By using the Plan B DR services, Kibble has avoided a potentially damaging impact on its business. The company experienced perfect business continuity – even though it’s critical server was out of action for 3 days. Kibble are now confident that, in the event of a disaster, it’s business will continue to run smoothly.
Nick West, Operations Director, Kibble IT Ltd added, “Using the Plan B Disaster Recovery service gave us the security that while an open ended problem was being resolved, we were able to carry on business with almost no interruption. This was just as well given the time it took to repair our server. Our migration back to our live service was planned and unhurried at a time convenient to our customers and in the knowledge that if something went wrong our business would not be affected.”
Why not protect your company with a Plan B?
Plan B DR offer a fully managed disaster recovery service that is tested every day, and will give you back your working systems within around 30 minutes, running on our remote virtual servers. It’s amazingly quick and easy to setup, needs no ongoing support and includes a local file backup feature.
However the advantages don’t stop there. Plan B’s service is also very cost-effective and charged monthly – we’re very highly automated, so we don’t have to spend a lot of engineering overhead per system we protect, and because we can split the hardware costs across multiple customers, we don’t have to charge a lot for that, either.
If you would like to make sure your business has a Plan B in the event of a disaster, then why not contact us for a free evaluation.
www.PlanBDR.co.uk info@PlanBDR.co.uk Tel. 0118 902 6966
Plan B Disaster Recovery – Cheaper, Faster, Better
Traditionally IT Disaster recovery (DR) solutions have been complicated and expensive, or cheap and ineffective. However, virtualisation technology is bringing about a revolution in IT DR, promising dramatically cheaper and more effective solutions.
Drawbacks of traditional disaster recovery provisions
Why have so many organisations historically failed to prepare properly for IT disasters? Well, the fact is that IT disaster recovery (DR) is complicated. Doing it well requires a lot of planning, and you’ll have to keep on updating the plan if it isn’t going to be totally useless by the time you want it. Testing the plan properly is almost never done, as it’s got a tendency to be ruinously time-consuming. This has left many with either cheap inadequate provisions or worse, expensive provisions that fall short of protecting the business.
The drawbacks of traditional approaches are that the solutions that stand a chance of recovering working systems in a reasonable timescale are costly (in fact, depending on your solution, prices can range from the inconveniently pricey to the truly legendary) and those that are cheaper are probably going to mean you will be without working systems for quite a long time. Also the unknown elements in the cheaper alternatives mean that there is little certainty as to how long you will have to wait for working systems.
Making it work in a crisis
Just a word about doing-it-yourself; Beware, running a highly repetitive process, when it’s not obviously needed to be done today, with IT staff who always have other more pressing things to do, can lead to those processes slipping on to back burners. It will almost certainly not get regularly checked or tested. Also if the worst does happen, you need to think if it is best to be solely reliant on your own team. They will probably be up to their eyes trying to deal with the cause of the disaster, or worst of all, may actually be caught up in the disaster itself. There is therefore a good deal of merit to intelligently outsourcing to ensure you can get back your systems quickly and calmly at the height of a crisis.
The promise of virtualisation
Virtualisation as the buzzword of the moment has a lot to live up to, but when it comes to disaster recovery, it really does show some promise. In fact it should be able to solve both the drawbacks of traditional disaster recovery approaches by dramatically reducing costs for vastly more effective, fast recovery solutions.
Virtualisation’s promise comes from its ability to provide a consistent computing environment regardless of the underlying hardware. This means that a system image can be made to work on any hardware, and because of the consolidation advantages of virtualisation, multiple workloads can be run on single physical machines.
So, if your live systems run on a virtual platform already, it is much easier to take your virtualised system images and run them elsewhere on other virtual machines. You still have to make this work in a crisis, but it’s a much easier prospect both to achieve and to practice.
That’s all good, as long as you want to move all your legacy systems onto a virtual platform or have done so already. But what if you haven’t or don’t want to go virtualised? Well, virtualisation can still deliver significant advantages for disaster recovery because it can dramatically reduce the hardware costs for the recovery platform.
As a result you can now purchase products that would allow you to make a virtual warm standby solution from a physical live server. Handy and clever, because this has solved both the drawbacks of traditional methods by being a lot cheaper to implement an effective fast recovery provision.
The utopia of a managed service based on virtualisation technology
At Plan B DR, however, we reckon that we’ve got an even better solution than all of the above. By taking the benefits of a virtualised recovery platform, and delivering a managed service around it, we get to build a service that’s greater than the sum of it’s parts.
We put a server appliance in our customer’s network, which takes snapshots of their data on a nightly basis. Our appliance encrypts and ships the snapshots to our systems, where we build and continually update virtual copies of their primary systems. Everything that would need changing to make their systems run in our facility is updated every time we update the data, which means that they’re ready to go immediately (literally as long as they take to boot), should our customers need them.
We don’t like to leave anything to chance, either, so every set of systems is automatically tested, as a set of systems, every day. If something doesn’t work, then we investigate, and either resolve the issue at our end, or point out what’s wrong on the primary server to the customer’s IT team. This automated 100% testing gives complete confidence to our customers that their systems will be there and work in a crisis.
So far, so good – an innovative, robust IT DR solution, that you know will work, is very easy to set up and requires no ongoing effort from the customer’s side. However the advantages don’t stop there; it’s also cost-effective – we’re very highly automated, so we don’t have to spend a lot of engineering overhead per system we protect, and because we can split the hardware costs across a lot of customers, we don’t have to charge a lot for that, either. Our architecture’s scalable, too – if we need to add more oomph to the silos, we just bolt more machines onto the side.
And – here’s some extra magic: Local file backup
Firstly, our appliance stores not only your most recent data, but as many old copies as it can fit. We let our customers use it for local file retrieval, where it functions as a very effective mechanism for ‘give me that spreadsheet back from last week’. And, unlike most backup solutions, because we test our images every day, you can be sure its working. The all-too-common nightmare scenario of ‘I needed this back, and that’s when I discovered that machine hasn’t backed up properly for three months’ just can’t happen to you if you’ve got Plan B DR.
Secondly, because we test every image, every day, we also get to tell you about your own systems. It’s amazingly common that people are operating systems that wouldn’t come back up cleanly when faced with the apparently unreasonable task of asking them all to be rebooted. Most of these problems are easy enough to solve, if you know they’re there in the first place, but most people never test for the scenario, as it’s highly disruptive to normal operations.
So… there’s the utopia. A real IT DR solution that is fast, simple, cost effective and that not only protects your systems should the worst happen, but one that actually makes it less likely that you’ll need it in the first place!
www.PlanBDR.co.uk Tel. 0118 902 6966 Email. info@PlanBDR.co.uk
One in three mid-sized companies in the UK does not have a disaster recovery plan in place for their website, according to recent research commissioned by managed hosting services provider NetBenefit.
With nearly three quarters of mid-sized UK companies now doing business online, the researchers argued that this represents a serious threat to online business continuity.
NetBenefit discovered that 67 per cent of companies have plans in place to guard against threats such as viruses, DoS attacks or unpredicted spikes in traffic, but only 38 per cent test their plans more than once a year.
The research also revealed that many mid-sized companies are underestimating the effect of downtime. Some 64 per cent of respondents anticipate ‘no damage’ or only ’slight damage’ to their business if their website went down for a whole day.
The study was conducted by independent research company Vanson Bourne among 100 UK IT directors representing companies with 250 or more employees.
NetBenefit said that the results highlight the risks companies are taking by failing to ensure a continuous service in the event of website failure.
Jonathan Robinson, chief operating officer at NetBenefit, said: “We know that the number of mid-market companies using the internet as a business channel continues to grow, but we have been very surprised by the lack of disaster recovery planning.
“Nearly every day we hear about viruses, hacking and other web attacks, let alone natural disasters such as fires or floods.
“While many companies go to great lengths to protect their physical assets with burglar alarms and other security devices, they do little or nothing to protect their vital online business.”
Plan B’s managed Disaster Recovery service has been shortlisted for this year’s Business Continuity Awards in the ‘Most Innovative Solution of the Year’ category.
The Business Continuity Awards recognise excellence within the field of business continuity and operational risk management. They will be presented in the Great Room at Grosvenor House on Wednesday 27 May 2009.
Tim Dunger of Plan B Commented ‘We are delighted to have been shortlisted and for Plan B’s service to be recognised in this way so soon after being launched. It’s a real endorsement of the service and the value we believe it brings to companies keen to protect their business in a simple, effective and inexpensive way.’
Bob Tarzey, in Computer Weekly 24/3/09, writes:
Plan B Disaster Recovery lowers the cost of business continuity
Author: Bob Tarzey
Posted: 10:37 24 Mar 2009
Topics: Business Continuity
Most users must have had one of those bad PC days, when you arrive at work enthused to complete a task, only to end up spending the day waiting for IT to fix your newly broken PC, or in a small business often doing it yourself.
When this happens at the server level, many users are impacted, and it can be expected to happen at the most inconvenient time, such as the end of a month, quarter or year.
Most managers are aware of the reliance their business has on IT and the impact of applications not being available, but although they may not like to admit it, many have only crossed fingers as a business continuity plan.
Basically they are hoping that the inevitable does not happen any time soon, and this is especially likely to be true for small and medium sized businesses (SMBs). There are a number of ways of mitigating the risk of such server failure.
Mitigate against server failure
One is to have a second server on hot or cold stand-by. This is expensive, at least doubling the cost of the initial investment in hardware and software, and unless the standby server is at a separate location, it does not protect against fire and flood.
A second is to engage a managed service provider (MSP) to host and manage servers; they then take on the task of providing a given level of availability.
For those with existing in-house systems, using an MSP might be a future consideration, but may not be practical for providing a business continuity plan in the short term.
And, anyway, MSPs are not immune from hardware failure, although they are more likely to spot emerging problems before they happen and to have the spare parts at hand to get systems up and running again quickly.
A third way is to use a service offered by a new company called Plan B Disaster Recovery (Plan B DR). It can put server level disaster recovery in place almost overnight.
Plan B DR does just what it says on the box: for a fee of about £180 per month per server it will keep images of your servers off-site at its datacentre ready to fire up if a disaster should happen.
The process is straightforward. Once you have signed up Plan B DR sends you an appliance which you plug into your network. A one time password allows you to browse to the appliance and identify target servers to which the appliance downloads an agent.
Outwardly the appliance can only communicate with Plan B DR, which uses it to create daily images of your servers and storage volumes associated with them.
Obviously this means you may lose up to 24 hours worth of data depending on when your server fails, but that is no different to the situation with normal daily backups. Basic server configurations do not change that often, but can be frustratingly hard to rebuild if no record has been kept of how that server had been built, possibly a number of years back.
Plan B DR allows, and recommends, that its service is tested on a regular basis, so when it comes to the crunch and the service needs to be invoked in anger there are no hiccups. When this does happen users are simply redirected via a virtual private network (VPN) link to a virtual server image running on Plan B DR’s infrastructure.
Virtual server
The provision of the virtual server is covered by the subscription for a few weeks until the old server is fixed or a new one found, at which point the server image can be reloaded in its current state by Plan B DR. The replacement could even be at the premises of an MSP if such a disaster provokes a rethink about how IT is managed in the first place.
Plan B DR has been up and running for four months. So far it supports only Microsoft servers, although it has plans for Linux. But as its target market is SMBs, where many servers are Microsoft-based, it has had plenty of interest and it has already signed up to 20 customers.
So far only one has required the service to be invoked for real (although a test invocation of every server image is carried out on a daily basis). Plan B DR sells the service direct or via resellers and it is considering working with overseas partners that could set up their own service with an agreement to use Plan B DR’s appliance.
Does Plan B DR have a Plan B? Of course: its main infrastructure is hosted by an MSP at a datacentre in Maidenhead UK. Its backup systems are in its own offices in Theale near Reading.
If, at the back of your mind you know that your business is vulnerable to a bad server day, maybe it is time to think about this type of a service, rather than investing in a back-up datacentre.