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cPanel Administrators, what is your Disaster Recovery Plan (DRP) ?
| Posted by alphix, 08-14-2009, 10:32 AM |
| Hi all.
I've read about R1Soft and how it helps to bring a hosting provider back alive from its Continuous Data Protection technology.
I have zero experience with R1Soft and I have been using the traditional cPanel's cpbackup -> Rsync Offsite Server method to backup my servers on a daily basis in a tar format.
I'm wondering what methods are the majority of the cPanel shared hosting providers are using for backups? And what is their DRP like?
TIA.
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| Posted by PeakVPN-KH, 08-14-2009, 10:43 AM |
| RAID 1 for everything. ZFS remote snapshots hourly to second datacenter, then we do a weekly rsync from the second datacenter to a third.
Our data is solid. R1Soft couldn't give us anything ZFS doesn't already.
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| Posted by alphix, 08-14-2009, 10:52 AM |
| Hi serverorigin,
Thanks for the heads up on your DRP.
During a power outage, I read that there is a possibility that the mirrored disks will break. Is it true?
How does the snapshots work? Is it based on the image of the entire server or just the cPanel accounts' backup archives? How fast can the hosting accounts on the affected server be restored?
TIA.
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| Posted by PeakVPN-KH, 08-14-2009, 11:22 AM |
| Good questions:
We've pulled the power during a write on ZFS and we didn't have any sort of corruption. The write just wouldn't occur on the second disk until the power comes back.
The snapshots are of the entire disks. We have servers in SharkTech and other places that serve as load-balancers for us. In the situation of a disaster at one of our DC's, we could use an existing server in a different location. Do a full rsync of the data and have the users online in an hour.
DR is incredibly expensive and as most companies, our most critical infrastructure (DNS/Company support/etc) has an immediate failover configuration with backups pushed to up to 4 systems geographically. There is always a possibility of slight disruption due to propagation. Customer data is also extremely important and we make every effort to have available backups. Depending on the server and the user's plan, really depends on how fast they will be back online.
We do some IRC hosting for Sun Microsystems and other companies. Services such as those have an immediate failover plan. Others, in a disaster, could suffer an up to 6 hour outage. Of course, this would be a situation where there was a real disaster such as a fire, flood, earthquake, etc.
If anyone has any questions or would like some help on DR planning, I'd be happy to assist.
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| Posted by UNIXy, 08-14-2009, 11:47 AM |
| There's failover too. We do realtime failover for specific domains but I guess it would incur a significant overhead on a shared server with hundreds of accounts.
Regards
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| Posted by ServerIntellect_BH, 08-14-2009, 12:03 PM |
| Hello,
R1Soft is great for Disaster Recovery / Bare Metal Restores.
It backs up the entire hard drive at the block level, allowing you to back up "open" files. It truely is great for restoring an entire OS to exactly how it was configured when it was backed up.
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| Posted by AquariusStorage, 08-14-2009, 12:23 PM |
| R1Soft is for sure a life saver. Unfortunately I am not sure if it was just lack of knowledge on how to operate it or what, however we had it fail on a 250GB server restore at 65% and then have to start from the beginning. The process seemed to take forever! At the time, we was with a company who provided managed R1Soft under their own "brand", and I wont drop their name in here because they are always running adds here and have a very favorable reputation here, however the restore process of the ~250 took almost 16 hours for the server with them... . We received a rather nice credit and they acknowledged the process was not handled correctly by their management.
That being said, no data was lost so that's a plus. R1Soft IS a life saver. I do think you should if your budget allows, have some sort of an additional fail over besides R1Soft in case it fails you
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