123 Textiles Corporation – Disaster Plan

123 Textiles Corporation is a company that makes textiles which is a flexible material which is refer to an interlacing of fibers’ such as yarn or some threaded fiber, than is formed by knitting, weaving or knotting. The 123 Textiles Corporation supplies their disturbers with textiles, and they only have one server in the network with all the information from these disturbers. The 123 Textiles Corporation is located in a trouble or high crime area which could be a problem form thievery. The company is also located on a fault line which has the occasional earthquake in the area. 123 Textiles Corporation has a valuable network server and no disaster plan to implement in case of a thief or some kind of nature disaster strikes the building where the company is located. This disaster plan will prepare 123 Textiles Corporation for any kind of damaging activity form a disaster. The planning strategy will be planned with using RAID system of data protection to protect the valuable server, and the data the server has in the system. With the server being by the window creates a problem in the plan, that problem will be address along with some security measures to help keep hackers at bay for a while. This plan will cover the steps if a disaster such as an earthquake hitting the area and damaging the server. This will give the company enough time to call all of their clients to advise them of the situation whether it was a break in or a nature disaster that cause the problem.

After examining the situation with the server the first thing that notice was the location of the server. The server should be move to a more secure location in the company’s building, that can with stand debris falling from the ceiling in case of an earthquake. Another reason the move the server is because a thief can see through the window. If there is no security system than they would just have to break the window, take and grab the server, without even entering the building. Next on the list would be power supplies which would consist of the UPS system of protection from any power surges, blackouts, and spikes. The UPS is uninterruptible power supply which is connected to the server and will protect it from the previously named power problems. With electrical problems there could be some loss of data, permanent hard drive

www.APC.com
damage, and even corrupted files can occur. Most UPSs can support servers depending on the size of the UPS, can hold power for a few hours which gives the network administrator plenty of time to save the data and shut the server down normally. The UPS is recommended for running the server without any power problems which will cut any extra cost for down time due to the power spikes, surges, and blackouts that with damage the network system.

The Fault tolerance will need to be implemented in the system for any disaster. The redundant array of inexpensive disk or in short RAID will provide the solution if the server gets corrupted or some other problem RAID will be there to repair or replace to problem with the backups it will create. RAID is a setup where two or more hard drives have to same data for when problems happen to the server or network. RAID 1 will allow improved performance because disk one will be accessed for writing information while disk two will be for reading the information requested. RAID has 6 different levels of system protection for different cases such as this case I will recommend that 123 Textiles Corporation use RAID 1 because of the time that this will save over RAID 0, 2-5. RAID 1 which is for two or more hard drives that mirror one another are completely redundant. With this setup if one fails the other disk will be able to sustain the network pending the disk that has failed is replaced, and restored with the information. With RAID disk controllers they will be able to take failed disk off the network, format the disk, and after that step the RAID disk controller can rewrite data from the working disk to the disk that has just been repaired and put back on the network (fig. 1).

RAID 0: Striping (High Performance)

Fig. 1 (www.answers.com)
With this system 123 Textiles Corporation will have to change their backup once a month, and start backing up the system on a weekly basis. This will help with information being current with all the clients that use 123 Textiles Corporation. The reason for RAID 1 over the others is that RAID 0 if one disk fails the whole system will fail. RAID 2 is out dated because most of the modern hard drives are embedded with ECC. RAID 3 dedicates one disk to an error correction data with good performance for a level of fault tolerance. RAID 4 is made for larger networks, more hubs, and servers. RAID 5 is also for bigger networks more data almost similar to RAID 4. In figure 2 is the recommended RAID system which LaCie 2 TB (Terabytes) 2big Quadra RAID EXT ESAST FW800 USB 2.0 which is easy to install in the current system once the server has relocated to a secure location in the building.

FIG. 2 (WWW.answers.com)
With this system the backups should be performed every day so any time a problem happens the company will not have any down time. There are other choses for back-up systems such as a common method tape drives are used often, but the server would to have an extra bay which if it gone than it will get costly to get a replacement tape drive. If the company when choose to go through with the tape drive one of the better drives would be a Seagate Advanced Intelligent Tape which has the capable of 1.3TB of data. The grandfather effect would come in play with the rotation of tapes. The first tape would be grandfather and that would start in the beginning of the month, than the father which would be weekly, and the son which is daily.

When or if there is the case of a break-in which does happen in a high crime area where the 123 Textiles Corporation is located than I would recommend a program that if the password is not correct the second time it will erase all data on the server. This program called OnlyMe which uses “Crack time lock” to erase all data after too many wrong passwords are type in the data will be no longer in the server which will protect the clients information. Now with the back-up situation plan under control now the focus is on moving the server to a protected or a high and more secure location in the build to protect it from thievery and an earthquake. There are containers that are rated to be structurally sound and will be able to protect the server, and RAID system. They recommend containers with ventilation or a cooling system hookup that will protect the devices from overheating which could be a problem.

With the recommendations made in this plan for the safety of the 123 Textiles Corporation and the clients information in case of a disaster. In this plan there was the right RAID system to get for the company what kind of containers for a disaster. The protection needed against a break-in, and where to store the server, and the RAID system from any kind of intrusion in the building.

References
University of Phoenix. (2004). Week Eight Local Area Networks. Retrieved October 14,2009
From University of Phoenix, Week Eight Intro to LAN Technologies IT 240 Web site.
Answers.(n.d). Retrieved October 14, 2009, from www. Answers.com web site.