Within a period of just 10 days, two of our clients experienced server failures. Typically, we deal with 1-2 server failures per quarter. However, the fact that there were two server failures in such a short time period is not what’s so interesting. What’s so interesting, and why I feel compelled to share this story with you, is the significant difference an inexpensive single business decision can make affecting revenue stream and employee productivity in real-time. Before you invest 60 seconds reading further, I want to keep from wasting your time. So, if your business can afford for your server to be offline for a few days, affecting your revenue stream and employee productivity, you do not need to read further – go ahead and delete this email.
Okay, so your business can’t afford to be down…
Client A was up and running within a few hours of their server failure while Client B was down for four days. Why, you may ask, was Client A able to recover so quickly while Client B experienced thousands of dollars in lost productivity and additional labor costs (not to mention the lost revenue opportunity)? The answer is simple. Client A had worked with us an inexpensive Disaster Recovery/Business Continuity plan and Client B had not. Client A was using Business Continuity Software that takes snapshots of their server every hour and features the ability to be restored to dissimilar loaner equipment. Client B was using traditional nightly backup software. So, when Client A’s server failed, we grabbed our Loaner Server (we have 2) and headed to their office. Within 1 hour, we had reimaged their old server to the dissimilar Loaner Server (right up to the last hour of data) and had the entire organization online generating revenue. We then took their failed server back to the office where we could focus on it without being in Client A’s way.
Since Client B still used the traditional nightly backup software (Symantec - incapable of quickly restoring to a different/dissimilar machine), we left the Loaner Server at the office and headed out to troubleshoot. Unfortunately, the entire server needed to be replaced (victim of electrical surge during a thunderstorm), so we had to wait for the new one to ship out from the distributor and arrive at our office. (Please note, servers cannot be purchased in town – they have to be purchased from Distributors). Four days later, Client B was back up and running. The good news was that we were able to perform a file copy from their nightly backup media to recover all of the data from the previous night’s backup and they now have Business Continuity Software in place. The bad news was the previous night’s backup was really 5 days old at this point and they lost 1 business days worth of data. The really bad news was that Client B’s office had been without server access to their files, email, calendar and contacts for four days – unable to correspond with their suppliers, vendors and customers. Fact - Nightly backups routines using SBS Backup or Symantec will protect your data in the long run. You just need to decide how long your business can run without a server.
Fact - We often think of a disaster as something catastrophic, when really it can be as simple as a motherboard failure, memory failure, hard drive failure, electrical surge or even water damage from an overflow or broken pipe. You received this email because your organization cannot recover from a server hardware failure quickly. Your business should plan on taking days to recover their server data (shared files, email, calendars, contacts), lost revenue and lost communications between suppliers, vendors and customers just like Client B from above. If your business needs it’s server(s) online quickly and cannot afford for staff to sit around for days without computer access to shared files, email, calendars and contacts, I suggest you to call me so we can discuss getting this Business Continuity Software in place ASAP. The cost per server is a one-time setup fee of $250 for both the necessary hardware and software. The monthly recurring is just $50 per server. Is $50 too much to pay to protect the organizations revenue stream and have your organization back up and running quickly?