Disaster Plan
Assignment week 8

The IST Department of XYZ Computers is located on the first floor. Payroll and all human resources records are processed daily and bi-weekly for 10,000 employees. After payroll is run, data is backed up using tapes. No firewall is in place and email is on the same server as payroll.
XYZ Computers is located in the southern part of the United States in an area that receives heavy rain. During the weekend, a major water pipe broke and flooded the first floor. The water caused extensive damage to the servers, which were on the floor.
IST unit of XYZ Computers is situated on first floor. The first order of business would be to relocate the servers to a more secure location on maybe an upper floor to avoid this type of event from occurring again. The company’s location means that we should consider moving all essential hardware for operations to second or third floor offices. The servers should not be on the floor no matter what floor they are located on. Heavy rains could also mean mud slides and extensive flooding. Having a warm site in a different region of the U.S. would make relocating the business easier if any natural disaster took place. Of course we would have to store remote servedrs that are being backed up at the same time that the servers on location are backed up in order to keep current on operations.
The disaster scheme of the organization can be established on the RAID scheme of information protection. In order for this to occur, it is important to understand the RAID system in detail then we would be capable of comprehending which RAID level can be used. RAID (redundant array of independent disks; originally redundant array of inexpensive disks) is a way of storing the same data in different places (thus, redundantly) on multiple hard disks. By placing data on multiple disks, I/O (input/output) operations can overlap in a balanced way, improving performance. Since multiple disks increase the amount of time between failures, storing data redundantly also increases fault tolerance.
There are at least six types of RAID plus a non-redundant array (RAID-0): Not all RAID levels are commercially available, and some are supported by only a few products.
There are three general types of RAID, these are as follows: reverberating, replicating data to more than just a single disk, marking, which is the disserving of data over more than a single disk. Finally there is error rectification, which is where extra data is stored to permit issues to be observed and determined which the more common term for this is error tolerance. Variant RAID levels make use of some of these methods, relying on the system requisitions. The basic intentions of making use of RAID are to enhance dependability, significant for safeguarding data that is vital to a business, for instance organized information of the employee payroll records, which are in use all of the time. A loss of data due to some sort of disaster would be very devastating for that company.
Since we have the e-mail and payroll on the same server with no firewall in place, I would suggest using adaptive load balancing. Adaptive load balancing technology can increase server bandwidth up to 800 Mbps over Fast Ethernet or 8 Gbps over Gigabit Ethernet, by automatically balancing traffic across as many as eight network adapters. Essentially, each additional adapter adds another 100 Mbits/s or 1000 Mbits/s link to the network. Once ALB is configured, all outgoing server traffic will be balanced across the adapter team. Incoming traffic is carried by a single adapter. In most environments, this is a highly effective solution, since server traffic is primarily outbound. Since the distribution of traffic among the adapters is automatic, there is no need to segment or reconfigure the network. The existing IP address of the server is shared by all the adapters in the server, and traffic is always balanced between them. All of the adapters in a team must be connected to a switch.
RAID 5 is very similar to RAID 0, but one of the hard drives is used for parity (error correction) to provide fault tolerance. To increase performance, spread the error correction drive across all hard drives in the array to avoid having the one drive do all the work in calculating the parity bits. RAID 5 is supported by NT 4.0 and most RAID vendors because it is a good compromise between data integrity, speed, and cost. RAID 5 has better performance than RAID 1 (mirroring). RAID 5 usually requires at least three drives, with more drives preferable. So this would be the most cost effective way to implement a good plan to avoid disaster for this company.
The configuration impacts dependability and output in variant manners. The trouble with making use of more disks is that it is more probable that one will go faulty, but by making use of error rectification the total system can be made more dependable by being capable of repairing and surviving the failure. Basic reverberating can speed up reading information as a system can detect variant information from both the disks, but it can be slow for perusing if the configuration necessitates that both disks must assure that the information is properly perused. Marking is mostly used for operation, where it permits series of data to be pursued off sundry disks together. Error rectification distinctively will make the system slow as information requires analyzing from sundry places and equating. The formulation of RAID systems is thus a compromise and apprehending the requisitions of a system is significant. Modern disk arrays basically render the adeptness to choose the required RAID configuration.
The great thing about the RAID disks is that they can continue to operate even if there is a failure allowing the disks to be hot switched and the data can be transferred mechanically while the system doesn’t have to stop the way it is operating, which helps response time for any problem. If this were not the case the system would need to be shut down entirely while the information is manually gathered from the system. RAID is frequently made use of in high accessibility systems, where it is significant that the system continues operating as much of the time as possible.The committed parity disk permits the parity drive to fail and function will go on sans parity or performance penalization. So with the tools gathered in this report and the means to implement it the unnecessary loss of data can be prevented. Really it should be, more than can be because the amount of loss that occurs when it happens is far greater than the loss that would happen if the data was lost, no properly ran business would allow for that type of risk to even consider the option to not have this security in effect.