Server Outages at ThePlanet

Today, 100’s of servers are offline due to a network issue at ThePlanet, a major dedicated hosting company delivering more than 40,000 servers. Many of our server management clients are impacted by this outages. We are trying to obtain more details and a estimated time for the fix. Currently, you can get updates on ThePlanet’s twitter account and their forum.

Off-Site Backups

Fortunately, our clients with server backup subscriptions have off site backups, so if this turns into a prolonged event like the data center fire in 2008, then we can restore you to an alternate provider. Last week I gave a webinar on backup best practices about disaster recovery protection and one of my key points was to assure your backups are off-site and available, preferably in another facility. During the fire in 2008, some clients who had on site backups could not get to them. As a result, they could not restore their operations quickly. For client with off site backups, we used R1Soft’s bare-metal recovery solution to move these operations elsewhere.

Events like the networking problems today underscore the need for good disaster recovery planning. Technology almost always breaks. It may not break often or for long, but you never know when the issue will strike so you have to be prepared.