You found the backup wrap up your go-to podcast for all things
Speaker:backup recovery and cyber recovery.
Speaker:In this episode, we talk about some hard earned disaster recovery lessons
Speaker:from major events like nine 11.
Speaker:We talk about what we learned about DR that day, and we talk about
Speaker:those critical human elements of DR.
Speaker:That people often forget, like where your recovery team is going to
Speaker:sleep when the hotels are all gone.
Speaker:Disasters happen and they're never convenient.
Speaker:Whether it's terrorists, hurricanes, or ransomware, you
Speaker:need to think through what you do.
Speaker:If you're completely isolated from the world, the time to
Speaker:learn these lessons are now.
Speaker:So I hope you enjoy this episode.
Speaker:By the way, if you don't know who I am, I'm w Curtis Preston, AKA, Mr. Backup,
Speaker:and I've been passionate about backup and disaster recovery for over 30 years.
Speaker:Ever since.
Speaker:I had to tell my boss that there were no backups of the
Speaker:big database that we just lost.
Speaker:I don't want that to happen to you, and that's why I do this podcast.
Speaker:On this podcast, we turn unappreciated backup admins into Cyber Recovery Heroes.
Speaker:This is the backup wrap up.
Speaker:Welcome to the show.
Speaker:Hi, I am w Curtis Preston, AKA, Mr. Backup, and I have with me a guy who
Speaker:is as lazy as I am when it comes to how to move rugs around the house.
Speaker:Prasanna Malaiyandi, how's it going?
Speaker:Prasanna.
Speaker:I am doing well, Curtis, by the way, isn't it amazing how quiet a room gets
Speaker:when you put something on the floor?
Speaker:Yeah, I, I, I wonder if anybody, uh, if anybody notices the difference
Speaker:in sound because it, you know, and it's been, they probably just got
Speaker:so used to the other sound, right?
Speaker:Because I. I went with LVP, you know, upstairs and um, and then in
Speaker:my office and it just got so echoy and I put the stuff on this wall.
Speaker:And this over here is a acoustic panels.
Speaker:Um, you know, behind me there are acoustic panels up on the ceiling
Speaker:and it still wasn't the same.
Speaker:I. And then I found, you know, I, I, I, this, this rug is from actually my
Speaker:living room because we bought a nicer rug and, uh, a nicer, bigger rug.
Speaker:And so we put that one down there and then I moved here.
Speaker:But when I moved it in, I, I, I did what I thought was like
Speaker:a really weird way to do it.
Speaker:I didn't actually move the furniture.
Speaker:I was like lifting it up and trying to do it without having to move everything out.
Speaker:And you said, well, that's exactly how I did it.
Speaker:exactly.
Speaker:Yeah.
Speaker:And I, I, I thought it was just me, but apparently.
Speaker:It wasn't.
Speaker:because at least with the rug, well, it depends on how your desk is too.
Speaker:But like you can at least unfurl part of it and just kind of like shove it down.
Speaker:Like you just lift
Speaker:up the front part and
Speaker:then you lift up the back part.
Speaker:So,
Speaker:yeah.
Speaker:I, I think different people might go, no, no, we're gonna,
Speaker:we're gonna move everything out.
Speaker:We're gonna put the rug down and we'll move everything back in.
Speaker:And they might think of that as easier, but I was like, I
Speaker:don't wanna move everything.
Speaker:well, it's more than moving.
Speaker:It's setting everything back up again.
Speaker:Yeah, I, I looked into it.
Speaker:I could have potentially moved the desk without disassembling everything.
Speaker:It was just, you know, but, um, yeah, so I, it was just nice to hear
Speaker:when I was talking to you for once.
Speaker:You weren't like, 'cause so many times I tell you about something that I'm
Speaker:doing and then you're like, that's the dumbest thing I've ever heard.
Speaker:Why would you do it that way?
Speaker:And you're like, oh no, that's, uh, that's how I do it.
Speaker:Yeah.
Speaker:Especially if you're space limited.
Speaker:Like for
Speaker:What's that?
Speaker:especially if you are space limited
Speaker:Yes, space limited is true.
Speaker:I was just looking, so I have my desk right here and then
Speaker:like that way, that way I
Speaker:have the door, but there's no way I could fit my desk outside of
Speaker:the door with it fully assembled.
Speaker:Oh yeah.
Speaker:I'd have to at least take the top off, which is just a giant chore.
Speaker:So.
Speaker:Oh yeah.
Speaker:Well, in my case, I don't have that excuse 'cause I have two French doors, so I
Speaker:wouldn't have had that excuse, but yeah.
Speaker:But it still, it still would've been, it still would've been annoying.
Speaker:And so, but we figured, we figured it out and now I have better sound.
Speaker:It's a beautiful thing.
Speaker:And, uh, so, uh, today we're gonna talk about DR and disaster recovery and
Speaker:lessons learned, and especially, um, some lessons learned from at least one
Speaker:major event, uh, one major disaster.
Speaker:And, you know, I, I don't want to, um, you know, the, these, these events,
Speaker:especially this event, disasters are, are always difficult on, on the people.
Speaker:Uh, and, and I don't want in any way make light of those disasters
Speaker:or I, I don't know, whatever, whatever I'm trying to say.
Speaker:Right.
Speaker:So proper respect to the people.
Speaker:'cause some of the, well, especially the one, the main one that we're
Speaker:gonna talk about, people died in these disasters and, um, you know,
Speaker:with respect to those people.
Speaker:Having said that.
Speaker:We can learn from the things that happened, uh, at that time.
Speaker:Right?
Speaker:And so let's talk about, and and the disaster.
Speaker:The, the main disaster I'm talking about at this point would be what
Speaker:we all called nine 11, right?
Speaker:So September 11th, 2001.
Speaker:Uh, I lived through it.
Speaker:You lived through it.
Speaker:Uh, so how old would you have been in 2001?
Speaker:I would rather not say
Speaker:I was very young.
Speaker:You were very young.
Speaker:I, I was actually in college.
Speaker:okay.
Speaker:I was here, um, and um, I was in this house and my kids were young.
Speaker:My oldest would've been, uh, seven, and my younger one would've been in four.
Speaker:And what I remember was she might've been in, she might've been five,
Speaker:she might've been in preschool or might've been in kindergarten.
Speaker:What I remember, and for those that don't know, I live in North County San Diego,
Speaker:which means I live just south of Camp Pendleton, which is, uh, you know, one
Speaker:of the biggest, uh, Marine Corps bases.
Speaker:The, the idea was that we were under attack because there were multiple events
Speaker:that were happening simultaneously.
Speaker:Right.
Speaker:Multiple planes hit the, the trade center, there was the plane that hit the Pentagon.
Speaker:There was the plane that went down in Pennsylvania.
Speaker:There was this feeling that, like we were being attacked
Speaker:as a country, which we were, and living near a military base.
Speaker:I don't know what I thought I was going to accomplish by keeping my kids home
Speaker:from school, but that's what I did.
Speaker:Yeah.
Speaker:I was just like, I'm gonna, I'm gonna, I'm gonna, I'm gonna, I'm
Speaker:gonna keep my kid, like, it, it, like, I, I, I don't even know what
Speaker:I was thinking, but like, you know, thinking back on it now I'm thinking
Speaker:that probably I was thinking that, um.
Speaker:I, I, I, if the world's gonna end, I want my kids near me.
Speaker:I
Speaker:mean, it was like, it was, it was, it was, it's kind of morbid.
Speaker:But that's,
Speaker:I, I just remember that I didn't, you know, that, that I kept my kids near me.
Speaker:Um, and I remember that I knew multiple people that worked in
Speaker:the Real World Trade Center.
Speaker:None of them were hurt that day
Speaker:Mm.
Speaker:and for various reasons.
Speaker:One, uh, and I know one person that was in the World Trade Center that day.
Speaker:I knew other people that worked in the World Trade Center, but
Speaker:for one reason or another, chose not to go into work that day.
Speaker:Hmm.
Speaker:I know another person that was supposed to be on Flight 11, which
Speaker:was from Boston to New York, which was the flight that ended up going.
Speaker:I don't know if that's the one that went into the Pentagon or
Speaker:if that's the one that crashed in Pennsylvania, but I knew a person that
Speaker:was supposed to be on that flight.
Speaker:That person did not get on that flight.
Speaker:And, uh, and then the other person that, that I knew was the person in
Speaker:the, in the trade center, it was, uh, Michael Hingis that was, uh, the, the
Speaker:blind person that made it, that made it down thanks to his seeing eye dog.
Speaker:Um, and he, you know, he.
Speaker:Somewhat famous.
Speaker:As a result.
Speaker:He actually went on to become a motivational speaker.
Speaker:And, um, and, uh, just to, just to lighten things up, I, I'll talk about,
Speaker:uh, how I first met Michael, and that was, and I, it seems like I've told
Speaker:this story relatively recently, but I was at my very first trade show.
Speaker:This would've been in the early nineties, and it was at, it was in
Speaker:New York, um, at the Javit Center.
Speaker:In Manhattan, and it was Unix Expo, and I saw, uh, these hot swappable
Speaker:dish drives, you know, where, where you
Speaker:could push a button and pull the drives out.
Speaker:And I just thought that was the coolest thing I'd ever seen.
Speaker:'cause at the, at the time that, that was unlike anything I'd ever
Speaker:seen it, it, that was really, really new and really, really cool.
Speaker:Now we just take it for granted.
Speaker:But back then it was really cool and he was, he was the one that was.
Speaker:The se standing in the booth demonstrating these, these, uh, disc drives and
Speaker:literally his, his shtick was.
Speaker:It's so easy a blind man can do it.
Speaker:Right?
Speaker:And um, and we were like, this is amazing.
Speaker:We're like, you guys are the only ones with it.
Speaker:And he goes, yes, we are the only ones with this product.
Speaker:And then we walked through the trade center or the trade show and we saw
Speaker:several other vendors with the product.
Speaker:And one of us said to the other.
Speaker:Well, in his defense, he can't see the other vendors.
Speaker:So true.
Speaker:Um, do you, do you remember, do you have memories of that day?
Speaker:Of course You do.
Speaker:Oh yeah, so I remember, so I went to school, I was in Pittsburgh actually.
Speaker:Mm-hmm.
Speaker:And so we had a lot of friends, or I had a lot of friends whose families were
Speaker:living in the city in New York City.
Speaker:Right.
Speaker:And so I remember everyone just was very, very concerned.
Speaker:Um, and like you had mentioned, there was sort of the plane flying towards.
Speaker:Uh, over Pennsylvania.
Speaker:And so everyone in Pittsburgh was keeping a close eye being like, Hey,
Speaker:where is that plane actually going?
Speaker:Because
Speaker:it was supposed to fly over Pittsburgh,
Speaker:right.
Speaker:right?
Speaker:So I remember everyone sort of being worried, concerned because they had family
Speaker:and relatives and they weren't able, like all the phone lines were shut down, right?
Speaker:So.
Speaker:No one was able to figure out like what was going on.
Speaker:I remember going with a bunch of other folks down to the common area
Speaker:and just kind of like just being like shellshocked as we're watching the news.
Speaker:Yeah, I, yeah, absolutely.
Speaker:Um, there's a, there's a great line in the beginning of a movie that I like.
Speaker:It's become problematic now.
Speaker:Um, maybe it was always problematic, but there's a movie called Love, actually,
Speaker:and in the beginning, which is, uh, voiceover from, um, Hugh, Hugh Grant.
Speaker:And, and, and he was saying on nine 11.
Speaker:There were a lot of phone calls that were made from the plains,
Speaker:and he said, to my knowledge, none of them were messages of hate.
Speaker:They were
Speaker:messages of love.
Speaker:Hmm.
Speaker:I just got a little of a clump there.
Speaker:Anyway, so, okay.
Speaker:So, um, when we think about that event, there is, in my world, we
Speaker:immediately started talking about.
Speaker:The, we saw the things that happened to companies, and we're gonna talk
Speaker:about, I'm gonna talk about sort of two, two different kinds of companies.
Speaker:One of them.
Speaker:So first off, let's talk about, uh, the, the difference between
Speaker:a cold site and a hot site.
Speaker:Do you, so when we talk about disaster recovery, there was this
Speaker:idea that we, that we're gonna have another site, like ready to go
Speaker:Yep.
Speaker:and we talk about cold site and the hot site.
Speaker:Do you want to talk about what that means?
Speaker:Yeah, so a hot site basically is you have a site, right?
Speaker:A disaster recovery site that is fully operational, has all the
Speaker:equipment, has everything replicated to it, and basically once you push
Speaker:the BRI big red button, right?
Speaker:Everything sort of fails over.
Speaker:It's available, operational, all ready to go, sort of ready
Speaker:to serve traffic and take over, usually minutes to hours within a
Speaker:failure.
Speaker:right.
Speaker:And then a cold site is very much the opposite of that, right?
Speaker:It's a site that's sort of ready to start a restore.
Speaker:Uh, like I suppose there'd be a, there'd be a no site,
Speaker:Yeah.
Speaker:right?
Speaker:That's where, uh, a bad thing happened.
Speaker:And we're gonna go find some hardware to restore
Speaker:to, uh, cold site, the, the.
Speaker:Implication there is that you have some hardware ready to go, but
Speaker:you haven't restored anything.
Speaker:A warm site is somewhere in between those two things,
Speaker:I've have, have you heard of this term that some people call pilot?
Speaker:A pilot light
Speaker:Yeah.
Speaker:talk to.
Speaker:Talk to me
Speaker:So it's basically not quite cold, but not quite warm or hot, right?
Speaker:So
Speaker:it's a little bit better than cold, but not quite to the extent.
Speaker:And a lot of the trade off comes from not necessarily having to
Speaker:eat all of the costs upfront.
Speaker:So
Speaker:as an example, if your pilot site is, say, in the cloud, you might have your
Speaker:data available, but not necessarily your compute and everything else ready to go.
Speaker:Yeah, I think that I, I think I would still call that a warm sight, but
Speaker:I mean, there is this concept, it comes from the concept of a pilot
Speaker:light.
Speaker:I. Right.
Speaker:Which for those of you that don't know, when you have a
Speaker:gas old school that
Speaker:nowadays we have electronic ignition, but there used to be this in inside,
Speaker:if you had a gas water heater or a gas furnace, there would be this
Speaker:little flame that would burn all the
Speaker:time.
Speaker:And that would, that's called your pilot light.
Speaker:And if the pilot light goes out, then you're gonna have to relight it
Speaker:because otherwise your, your heat won't work.
Speaker:Um, modern days we use.
Speaker:electronic electronic ignition,
Speaker:but, um, because a pilot like just wastes a lot of,
Speaker:yep.
Speaker:It's always running and you're always consuming gas.
Speaker:Yeah.
Speaker:Um, so there, so the, the best from a DR perspective, right?
Speaker:The, the, the, the Cadillac, if you will, is, um.
Speaker:The, I don't know if that's the right term anymore because nobody buys Cadillac, the
Speaker:Ferrari, the Rolls Royce.
Speaker:Does anybody buy, do they still make Rolls
Speaker:Oh yeah.
Speaker:Okay.
Speaker:Um, is the hot site
Speaker:that it's, it's, it's ready to go.
Speaker:Number one.
Speaker:It's ready to go when you need it, and, and two, it's kept and
Speaker:it's ready to go within a, a few.
Speaker:Minutes or seconds, right?
Speaker:It's kept as up to date as possible, as much as technology
Speaker:would allow you to do so.
Speaker:And one of the challenges with a hot site is, is latency.
Speaker:And so you might want to put the hot site
Speaker:as close
Speaker:as you can to, uh, the, the site that you're preparing
Speaker:and what happened on nine 11.
Speaker:So there were many companies to, for their hot site, uh, or had
Speaker:their main data center in one tower
Speaker:and had their hot site in another data in the other tower.
Speaker:which makes perfect sense.
Speaker:As long as nothing would take out both towers
Speaker:Yep.
Speaker:and.
Speaker:So unfortunately, as we know, you know, both towers, I mean, that,
Speaker:that's what I woke up to by the way.
Speaker:I, I
Speaker:woke up to my wife saying both of the, 'cause I'm on the west coast, so both
Speaker:of the towers had already collapsed
Speaker:as you know, as I was waking up.
Speaker:And so people lost or companies lost their.
Speaker:their.
Speaker:primary site and their hot site in, in the same moment.
Speaker:And so one of the things we learned, nine 11 is to make sure that you are,
Speaker:if you're doing some sort of hot site or warm site, is to put that site, I'm
Speaker:gonna say nowhere near, um, that the, the site that you're being protected.
Speaker:Now let's talk about that.
Speaker:Um, there were actually some attempts, um, I lived through
Speaker:this because I was working.
Speaker:For companies at the time, and that is there were attempts at regulation to say,
Speaker:If you're a bank or whatever you need to put, if you're financial training,
Speaker:you need to put a copy of your data.
Speaker:Uh, that's, that's hot over 200 miles away.
Speaker:Yep.
Speaker:was an attempt at regulation.
Speaker:What's the problem with that?
Speaker:Um, 200 miles away if you're, depending on the type of disaster isn't far enough.
Speaker:And so that's
Speaker:not the problem.
Speaker:But the second is latency.
Speaker:yeah, that's the problem, right?
Speaker:It's just simply not feasible because the, the, the round trip time, the 200 mile
Speaker:round trip time, uh, was just far too long that couldn't keep the data up to date.
Speaker:depending on the
Speaker:Based on the technology at the time,
Speaker:Yeah.
Speaker:Well, and I think it depends.
Speaker:So I do so.
Speaker:Many years after nine 11, I was working at a storage company and one of the
Speaker:things that they did was they also like talking to financial customers, right?
Speaker:Is many of 'em had what they would call dark fiber,
Speaker:Yep.
Speaker:right?
Speaker:Where they would basically run fiber optics, two fiber network between
Speaker:their two sites, and it would.
Speaker:You're right.
Speaker:It wouldn't be completely eliminate the latency, but it would definitely
Speaker:help versus say routing it over a public network of any type.
Speaker:Yeah, we definitely, you would.
Speaker:I, I think that there was an assumption of dark fiber, uh, at that point, but even
Speaker:200 miles on a straight piece of glass, speed of light has a speed of, speed of
Speaker:light is not, it's not instantaneous.
Speaker:It's whatever it is.
Speaker:187,000 miles a second or whatever,
Speaker:six hundred or something like
Speaker:something like that.
Speaker:Right.
Speaker:Um, the, the round trip time is gonna be measured in milliseconds.
Speaker:It's not gonna be, it's not, it's, it's, it's going to significantly increase
Speaker:latency, especially if we start talking about synchronous transfer of data.
Speaker:Right.
Speaker:Now let's talk about synchronous versus sacred.
Speaker:Synchronous versus asynchronous transfer of data.
Speaker:You want to give that a shot?
Speaker:Yeah, so synchronous is.
Speaker:Basically a right comes into your production site.
Speaker:It gets forwarded over to your DR site.
Speaker:The right gets, now there are different flavors, but typically the right gets
Speaker:committed on the DR site acknowledged back to the primary site, and then the
Speaker:primary site acknowledges the client during which, so you have to add up
Speaker:basically the latency of going over the writes on both sides, coming back before
Speaker:the client acknowledges, in which case you're guaranteed that that right has hit
Speaker:both sites and so the client can move on.
Speaker:Which is great as long as it doesn't take too long.
Speaker:Yes.
Speaker:So that's synchronous and asynchronous is something, is, is uh, different than that.
Speaker:And we, we've had some different, between you and I, we've had some
Speaker:different understandings of different kinds of asynchronous, but go ahead.
Speaker:Yeah, so for me, asynchronous is, well, what I would call semi synchronous, but
Speaker:that's a different case is where, uh, you accept the right on the production,
Speaker:you forward it over to the secondary or DR site, but, but while it's in
Speaker:process of being committed on the other side, you can acknowledge the client.
Speaker:So there is a lag.
Speaker:Um, you could decide how long that lag is, depending on technology and the vendor.
Speaker:Some allow you to specify at an IO level so you can say, I want
Speaker:10 transactions outstanding.
Speaker:Others allow you to do it in terms of seconds.
Speaker:So I'm allowing up to 10 seconds or 30 seconds, um,
Speaker:Before you start, before you start kicking back a performance issue to the client.
Speaker:Before
Speaker:you start Yeah.
Speaker:Putting back pressure.
Speaker:Now
Speaker:interestingly, there is a mode, which I'm not sure if you're aware of,
Speaker:uh, that some financial co companies requested, which is called Domino mode.
Speaker:Talk to me.
Speaker:So it's a form of synchronous replication where it, because in
Speaker:synchronous replication, typically you write to the client, it sends it over.
Speaker:If the right fails on the secondary, it'll still accept it on the primary.
Speaker:And acknowledge back to the client, right?
Speaker:So you're not guaranteed that it'll stop writes if it can't write to
Speaker:both sides At the same time, there's a mode called domino mode where if
Speaker:it can't write to both sides, it will not acknowledge the client.
Speaker:So that's why it's called a Domino.
Speaker:One takes out the other.
Speaker:I, I would think that,
Speaker:this is one of those, this is one of those things where, you know, uh, this
Speaker:is reality versus the idea, right?
Speaker:To me.
Speaker:domino mode that you described, that's synchronous.
Speaker:Anything other than that is not synchronous, right?
Speaker:And anything other than the domino mode that you described,
Speaker:I would call asynchronous, right?
Speaker:So these either synchronous, it's sort of like immutable and not immutable, right?
Speaker:It's either synchronous or it's not synchronous.
Speaker:And if it's synchronous, then it shouldn't acknowledge the right to the
Speaker:client until both writes have been done.
Speaker:And if one of them fails, then they're not done.
Speaker:yeah.
Speaker:So at least from most of the vendors I've seen,
Speaker:they've never implemented it that way.
Speaker:Yeah.
Speaker:That's interesting.
Speaker:Well, they're wrong.
Speaker:So, um, uh, yeah, so that was, so that was a lesson we thought we
Speaker:learned at the time, but we need to make sure we put it far enough away.
Speaker:But then they were like, it's gotta be synchronous and
Speaker:it's gotta be 200 miles away.
Speaker:They're like, eh, it's not gonna work.
Speaker:Right.
Speaker:Um, nowadays, you know, you hinted at it earlier, nowadays we would do this with
Speaker:the cloud and we can put it actually, because, you know, you, you did say that
Speaker:your first problem was that it wasn't far enough, and that's probably true, right?
Speaker:Because especially when we start talking about certain areas
Speaker:like Southern Florida, right?
Speaker:200 miles isn't far enough.
Speaker:Um, and um, so with the cloud, you can put it.
Speaker:Pretty much anywhere.
Speaker:Now, if we're going to do that, if, especially if we're gonna use
Speaker:public networks, we're pretty much going to have to use asynchronous
Speaker:of some sort, right?
Speaker:Uh, so we're gonna send the data and put it another place we're going to,
Speaker:you know, like you said, you can have a buffer, you can have a certain amount
Speaker:of time that it's allowed to get behind before it, uh, like you said, put, what
Speaker:do you mean when you say back pressure?
Speaker:So this is where you start to, um, elongate the time
Speaker:before acknowledging a right.
Speaker:So
Speaker:to the client, because typically your client will sort of throttle itself
Speaker:because at some point your latencies are gonna get into the seconds
Speaker:and they'll be like, no, no, no.
Speaker:Something's going on.
Speaker:I'll slow down.
Speaker:right.
Speaker:Because otherwise you're just gonna start dropping the writes.
Speaker:And.
Speaker:And, and this is a, a configuration choice on the part of the customer
Speaker:where they can say, I don't want to ever put back pressure.
Speaker:I wanna, uh, you know, that, that the data protection is less important
Speaker:than actually getting the job done.
Speaker:And then other clients would say, if I don't back it up, I don't
Speaker:wanna write it in the first place.
Speaker:Right.
Speaker:Um, I, I, obviously, I tend to be more towards the latter than the former.
Speaker:Yeah.
Speaker:Uh, from, uh, most of the companies I've seen are vendors.
Speaker:Yeah.
Speaker:They're not in line with you.
Speaker:Meaning Meaning that they would just go ahead and do it anyway?
Speaker:Yeah, because most customers Right.
Speaker:Unless you
Speaker:have very, very strict regulations.
Speaker:Right.
Speaker:They're like, best effort
Speaker:Yeah.
Speaker:I, I think it's
Speaker:because they will
Speaker:that I care about data protection more than the average
Speaker:person,
Speaker:Because the thing is, at some point it will catch back up.
Speaker:Hopefully,
Speaker:Hopefully yes.
Speaker:Depending on what the problem was.
Speaker:right.
Speaker:Um, and, and again, as long as we're okay with the potential,
Speaker:right, um, uh, I, I would think that there should still be some number.
Speaker:number might be measured in hours if we're hours behind updating
Speaker:our other copy, something.
Speaker:Might be drastically wrong that we need to look at.
Speaker:Yep.
Speaker:And the other thing to also mention is with a lot of this.
Speaker:High end.
Speaker:I normally refer to it as tier one storage systems
Speaker:Yeah,
Speaker:because these are tier one applications with very strict requirements.
Speaker:Um, usually also they provide the ability to do automatic failover.
Speaker:So it's kind of, think of it like high availability plus clustering.
Speaker:right.
Speaker:So if you take a look at a lot of the tier one storage, right, they might have two
Speaker:storage systems in both locations with the drives that are all interconnected.
Speaker:So in case one unit fails, the other unit can take over the diss of the other side.
Speaker:Um, the clients are also connected to both sides, so they don't
Speaker:have to worry about failing over.
Speaker:Um, I can't remember what it was called.
Speaker:It's like the optimized and non-optimized connectivity for fiber channel,
Speaker:which allows it to have a preferred path and a non-preferred path.
Speaker:So you still
Speaker:have connectivity, so your clients will automatically fail over, so you
Speaker:don't have to do anything, and so your writes can still continue to happen.
Speaker:Yeah.
Speaker:So that's a big thing, is like, you know, we, we, we learned that
Speaker:we should have it farther away.
Speaker:We learned that maybe we shouldn't have it too far away, but, but,
Speaker:but now with the, with the.
Speaker:With the cloud, we can potentially have it pretty much anywhere, but we
Speaker:definitely have to rely on some sort of asynchronous, uh, uh, communication.
Speaker:When, I think about our, our friends that came on the show.
Speaker:Talk about their experiences with disaster.
Speaker:I think there's some, that was a major, that was a hurricane
Speaker:that took out an island
Speaker:and they had multiple data centers on that island.
Speaker:One was more in the high ground than the other.
Speaker:So one was flooded, the other was not.
Speaker:And they were gonna recover from one data center to the other.
Speaker:And that's, and they had everything they needed there.
Speaker:They did.
Speaker:They needed personnel.
Speaker:They had to fly people to the island.
Speaker:But other things happened that we can also learn from.
Speaker:Do you, what do you remember from those?
Speaker:So from, so there were two things I remember.
Speaker:One was sort of.
Speaker:The people process stuff, which I think we rarely think about.
Speaker:And then the other was the technology piece.
Speaker:So from a people process perspective, it was, do you have the right people in
Speaker:country who have the expertise and the
Speaker:skills to
Speaker:recover?
Speaker:Where are they going to sleep?
Speaker:Where are they going to get food?
Speaker:Right?
Speaker:All the things that you kind of take for granted, right?
Speaker:They had none of that.
Speaker:Like how do they communicate
Speaker:Yeah.
Speaker:He, as I recall, he, he turned a, a, um, a conference room into a
Speaker:hotel room
Speaker:Right.
Speaker:And slept on a cot and ate rice and beans for two
Speaker:weeks.
Speaker:And he was lucky to
Speaker:get rice and beans right?
Speaker:Because there were a lot of people who didn't even get that.
Speaker:Yeah.
Speaker:Um.
Speaker:Yeah, that's, that is definitely a, a lesson learned is that, you
Speaker:know, make sure to take the human element into your DR design.
Speaker:Right.
Speaker:Um, and the one that, the one that stands out to me was
Speaker:the reliance on the mainland.
Speaker:Yeah.
Speaker:Right.
Speaker:That when you have a true disaster, whether it's on an island or just.
Speaker:You know, wherever you might not be able to get connectivity to the rest
Speaker:of your computing infrastructure.
Speaker:And in this case, their authentication and authorization, their IAM system
Speaker:relied on active directory, which
Speaker:all of which was in, was in the mainland.
Speaker:And um, so this is just, you know, the lesson there is to just make sure that.
Speaker:To just take that into consideration, right.
Speaker:Just the, the realize that in a real disaster, you may be very
Speaker:isolated from the rest, rest of the world, and you need to take
Speaker:that into consideration in your DR.
Speaker:Design.
Speaker:Yeah.
Speaker:And, but I think this becomes so difficult, right, Curtis, because
Speaker:like how many scenarios are you gonna play in your head and how much time
Speaker:are you gonna focus on some of these?
Speaker:Now granted, a hurricane on a tropical island is probably
Speaker:a high likelihood event,
Speaker:Yes.
Speaker:Right.
Speaker:Well, I,
Speaker:of that, but.
Speaker:well, I, I, I think it's, I think it's a totally, I think that there's two
Speaker:things that you cannot count on, right.
Speaker:Um, I. and and I, I would just say one thing that covers the number of
Speaker:things, and that is utilities, right?
Speaker:You cannot count on the internet.
Speaker:You cannot count on power.
Speaker:You cannot count on, um, you know, uh, water,
Speaker:right?
Speaker:You can't count on those three things.
Speaker:And so I, I'm just saying, I don't, I don't think you, you don't need
Speaker:to think of all of the reasons that one or more of those might not.
Speaker:Yeah.
Speaker:available.
Speaker:You just need to plan for them not being available.
Speaker:If you don't have internet, if you don't have whatever it is you,
Speaker:however you communicate between your sites, you are going to be isolated.
Speaker:If you don't have power, you're gonna need to supply your own power,
Speaker:right?
Speaker:Um, these are just things that you can think, you can
Speaker:think through these things, and these are all things that you can say either.
Speaker:I'm just saying, have that discussion.
Speaker:And say, you know what, if we don't have power, we're not gonna do anything.
Speaker:We're not
Speaker:gonna spend $15 billion on power generators
Speaker:Yeah,
Speaker:in case we, you know, we might, or, or you might be subject
Speaker:to regulations, or you might
Speaker:have, uh, financial reasons why downtime is enough.
Speaker:That, or the cost of downtime is enough that you're gonna pay for generators.
Speaker:Um, do you remember how they got internet over there?
Speaker:It was satellite.
Speaker:Yeah.
Speaker:satellite.
Speaker:I like this idea of making sure that you think about what would
Speaker:you do if the utilities that you're normally counting on are not
Speaker:available?
Speaker:If you get completely isolated, what would you do?
Speaker:There are a number of reasons why that might end up being the case.
Speaker:or the, or the people that you normally depend on are not available.
Speaker:Yes.
Speaker:This is why we had this little thing called documentation.
Speaker:Yeah.
Speaker:Um,
Speaker:And,
Speaker:and
Speaker:go ahead.
Speaker:and hopefully I know when we've had Mike, Dr. Mike on the podcast, right?
Speaker:Um, he's talked about sort of doing tabletop exercises, right?
Speaker:So have you done a tabletop exercise, which is like, Hey, what happens if the
Speaker:main IT person, Susie, is unavailable?
Speaker:Right, right.
Speaker:And, and that's what you do.
Speaker:You work through those various scenarios.
Speaker:You, you hire somebody to come in as an outsider is the best way to do that.
Speaker:When we start talking about ransomware, um, Dr. Mike Sailor's company would,
Speaker:would, would be a great resource for that.
Speaker:It's good to use a very negative person.
Speaker:Think the most negative person in your environment, the most
Speaker:pess, pessimistic person.
Speaker:And, uh, no, no.
Speaker:Pessimist thinks they're negative.
Speaker:They, they think they're, they're realists,
Speaker:will realize
Speaker:Um, yeah.
Speaker:Sort of the final thought that I'm thinking is, and, and I, I remember.
Speaker:Doing a disaster recovery of my own, and that is, I did it where.
Speaker:I had not yet tested the throughput of the
Speaker:backup system that we were doing and the throughput of the backup system we
Speaker:were doing, it turned out to be crap.
Speaker:Right?
Speaker:And as a result, uh, that was a really hard day.
Speaker:And in Curtis land, right?
Speaker:This is
Speaker:very early in my career, I learned it.
Speaker:What's that?
Speaker:Yes, it was the compression thing.
Speaker:Yeah.
Speaker:So make sure that when, when you make configuration changes to your
Speaker:backup system or your DR system, make sure that you test that.
Speaker:Just realize that in general, restore speed is slower than backup speed.
Speaker:It just is.
Speaker:It's the way it, you know it, you know, back in the day with tape, it
Speaker:was because we were doing multiplexing.
Speaker:Nowadays it would would with dedupe.
Speaker:It's because of dedupe.
Speaker:Um, and so just sort of plan for that.
Speaker:But don't, don't just assume how much slower it is, uh, test it and see how much
Speaker:slower it is and make sure you figure that into the, to the disaster recovery plan.
Speaker:But, um, so, um, with that, I think that's enough for now in terms of lessons learned
Speaker:from just, you know, the pains of others.
Speaker:Um.
Speaker:Just think of the scenarios that might be, you know, that you might be subject to.
Speaker:Um, make sure you've got at least one copy of your data
Speaker:that's far away from everything.
Speaker:Um, and the way to probably do that today is cloud taped can still play a role.
Speaker:In fact, our previous episode we talk about why tape is
Speaker:still not dead in backup.
Speaker:Uh, it certainly is on life support, but there
Speaker:is, you know.
Speaker:There is, there is a use for tape and backup and it's disaster recovery.
Speaker:So, um, um, especially when we start talking about disaster
Speaker:recovery from a ransomware attack.
Speaker:So, well, thanks for chatting again, my friend.
Speaker:No, it was good.
Speaker:Uh, one thing I'm surprised you, I thought you were gonna mention, but you did not,
Speaker:The 3, 2, 1 rule.
Speaker:1 rule.
Speaker:You were just
Speaker:You know what's funny is we were so close.
Speaker:We were so close.
Speaker:Yeah.
Speaker:Yeah.
Speaker:The whole 3, 2, 1 rule with, you know, three copies of your data on two
Speaker:different media, one of which is offsite.
Speaker:That, that, that's a core design concept for anything.
Speaker:Uh, backup in dr. And, and that's, yeah, you're right.
Speaker:We never, we, we didn't mention, but now we have, so you
Speaker:have corrected our oversight.
Speaker:Thank you very much.
Speaker:And thank you to our listeners.
Speaker:We'd be nothing without you.
Speaker:That is a wrap.
Speaker:The backup wrap up is written, recorded, and produced by me w Curtis Preston.
Speaker:If you need backup or Dr. Consulting content generation or expert witness
Speaker:work, check out backup central.com.
Speaker:You can also find links from my O'Reilly Books on the same website.
Speaker:Remember, this is an independent podcast and any opinions that
Speaker:you hear are those of the speaker and not necessarily an employer.
Speaker:Thanks for listening.