Availability Guide for Problem Management

Availability Guide for Problem Management–125509
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Planning for Disasters
Overview
Contingency planning can help you prevent, prepare for, and recover from a disaster.
Disasters can occur any time and anywhere. In companies where day-to-day business
activity is tied to a computer system, a sound recovery plan is imperative. Planning
ahead can help you avert some disasters and respond to those disasters you cannot avert.
This section describes:
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How to prevent disasters from occurring
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How to implement disaster recovery planning
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How to set up backup sites
What Is a Disaster?
A disaster can be any sudden calamitous event that brings widespread or localized
destruction, loss, chaos, or injury.
Disasters are commonly associated with environmental occurrences such as fire, flood,
earthquake, and so on. However, companies are also at risk from nonenvironmental
disasters (for example, a chemical leak that makes a facility unusable), crimes, civil
unrest, utility or power failures, and telecommunications failures.
Disasters can lead to great losses by:
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Disrupting internal business procedures
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Causing a loss of business volume, corporate assets, and good will
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Damaging the company’s reputation
Losing staff, materials, supplies, data, equipment, power, and so on (partially or totally),
could damage your computer system so much that further losses would severely hurt
your company.
For these reasons, it is important for you to identify the risks to system operations, to
take preventive actions, and to develop a recovery plan.
Averting Disasters
The first step toward preparing for a disaster is to make a dedicated effort to prevent one
from occurring. Tandem systems give you a head start on disaster prevention by
providing continuous operations and fault tolerance, by preserving data integrity, and by
allowing geographic independence and flexible system configurations. However, it is up
to you to make sure that these unique Tandem features are used, that your system is
properly maintained, and that your other operations are reviewed in terms of preventing
disasters.