1. Backup outside of the Cloud

Some of the high profile companies affected by Amazon's April 2011 outage could have recovered had they kept a backup of their entire site outside of the cloud.  With any hosting provider, managed traditional data center or cloud provider, alternate backups are always a good idea.  A MySQL logical backup and/or incremental backup can be copied regularly offsite or to an alternate cloud provider.  That's real insurance!

2. Use alternate regions and availability zones

Amazon's outage in April …

Tumblr has been down for more than 12 hours due to an issue with their database cluster. Here is the comment I left on GigaOm.com

This is the freshest lesson for entrepreneurs and startups:
- Learn to value your data
- Implement a high availability plan
- Plan a disaster recovery strategy

“Tumblr likely has the resources to recover…”

I really hope that holds out true but remember, data is the only irreplaceable asset of an organization. Once it’s gone, it’s gone.

When I was handling the disaster at Fotolog (massive database corruption when our SAN crashed), I couldn’t find any company or consulting firm ready to handle the situation and help with data recovery. It was a miracle that I came across the concept of DUDE (Data …

Last week, I was at the NetApp office in North Sydney for the presentation on NetApp SnapManager for Oracle. It was good opportunity to learn more about NetApp snapshots while working on a project for one of our clients in Sydney. It was an especially interesting topic as I have some experience using Veritas Checkpoints (see my presentation on test systems refreshes), and it was interesting to see what’s different and new in the NetApp implementation. But I digress.

I learned that NetApp can provide access to the same LUNs via either Fiber-Channel (FC) or iSCSI. And this is when the interesting argument surfaced. Apparently, some companies aim to have the technology stack on their …