Planning for a disaster is a practice in which every business must participate. No matter how brilliant your IT staff and how grand your server rack, hardware can still fail for what seems to be no apparent reason.

Your team needs to be ready to meet catastrophe as soon as it surfaces. No healthcare system uses the same server environment nor do any back up data in the exact same fashion so no business will execute the exact the same recovery plan. Though a parallel disaster plan may not consist of the same steps, the outcome is to restore functionality to your system.

One of the most important things to remember is that speed is crucial when it comes to restoring an in house server. If your system is configured in RAID configuration that supports redundancy, your data is likely safe momentarily. RAID configurations like 5 and 6 can still function with a failed hard disk but if another should fail, the whole array can be destroyed. Preventing a total outage is the goal. Even if it takes waking a couple of your IT guys at an unreasonable hour, it’s worth it – they realize this too. Manufacturers like IBM, HP and Dell all make GUIs for some of their prebuilt systems that allow for easy monitoring of system statistics. Tools like this can acquire the attention of the technicians and thus get the ball rolling on a repair before a system experiences any lag due to a failure.

Hardware failures usually occur in clusters. Generally, when you initially purchase and set up a server, you will purchase many of the same parts from the same manufacturer at the same time. If your hardware fails from a defect, it is likely that other parts of the same kind will follow suit around the same time. Usually, a failure in a server environment is related to heat. Overheating can occur for any number of reasons like dust, poor airflow, faulty hardware and more. Getting the system cool quickly is critical to prevent further devices from failing.

Total outages should not be a frequent occurrence when utilizing today’s server technology. Many servers, whether a rackmount server or a preconfigured enterprise “do-it-all” server, feature hot-swappable hard drives. These allow your team to swap out these devices without having to completely shut down the machine. Some systems today have proprietary storage methods built into their controllers and will actually begin to rebuild disks as soon as they are installed. It should go without saying that utilizing uninterruptable power supplies is a must. The region of the country where your servers should determine how you will accommodate for power outages; some businesses purchase power generators in case of lengthy power cuts.

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