  |
|
||||
|
OnTrack to Storage Admins: "Take Our Advice."By Pedro HernandezJune 2, 2004
 OnTrack Data Recovery, a division of Kroll Inc., is in the business of retrieving data from fried servers and damaged hard drives. Organizations large and small call on OnTrack when their systems head south and take their valuable data with them. So it may come as somewhat of a surprise that the company recently released a checklist of steps administrators can take to mitigate the very damage that OnTrack corrects for clients. Sounds suspicious, right? It turns out that there is really nothing sinister about their free advice to administrators. You see the universe itself seems to conspire to keep OnTrack in business. Mother nature, in the form of natural disasters, storms and ill-placed lightning strikes, does an efficient job of wrecking tons of hardware, much of which ends up at the company's doorstep. Computers can also be notoriously temperamental because they've been driven past their breaking point or simply "gave up the ghost" before their time. People too, can be just as destructive. Be it accident-prone administrators, technologically inept users, carelessness or poor management and upkeep, the human factor plays an embarrassingly huge role. Whatever the cause, OnTrack has been called upon time and again to salvage wrecked disks. 99 percent of the time, the company has proven successful. This year to date, the company has brought over a petabyte of data (1,024 terabytes) back from the dead for its customers across the globe. This includes data from drives that require the attention of their on-site technicians plus remote retrieval operations where the company's experts diagnose problems and perform repairs over the Internet. Of course, a call to OnTrack for each and every drive and server failure is unrealistic, and will quickly get shot down by your CIO. The company readily admits that they should be called upon when critical, irreplaceable information is at stake and normal recovery procedures fail. Otherwise, a mutli-pronged strategy is recommended. Several storage management apps have built-in repair capabilities. As an extension of its service business, OnTrack also provides utilities to help do-it-yourselfers access and offload otherwise lost data (free trials available here.). Admins should also operate on the notion that sooner or later, disks will fail. Period. When that happens, the diligent ones will be rewarded with fairly complete and easily recoverable (relatively so, at least) data sets instead of a hopelessly corrupted and indecipherable mess. How should admins prepare? Page 2: The Tip Sheet
|
|
|
|
  |
|
|
||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
Generate Revenue Through IT Using Business Service Management
Managing the Modern Network
Storage Networking 2, Configuration and Planning
Is Your Disaster Recovery Plan Good Enough? Get Disaster Recovery Right 
Email
Print
Digg This
Add to del.icio.us
