A sound
business continuity / disaster recovery plan is critical to a business’s
long-term success. Business continuity planning spans a range of
services from restoring data after major system failure, recovering
after catastrophic acts of nature (our data centers are fully backed by
surplus fuel and generators), and planning for a security breach.
We offer a full suite of data synchronization and recovery procedures
depending on customer’s needs. For customer systems that require
additional guarantees of reliability we have implemented solutions:
“mirror” server, load balance servers and can also implement
geographically dispersed mirror solutions should this be needed, as we
have multiple data center locations. We strive for fault tolerance
system – planning for no single point of failure.
Internet Security - as a Web Hosting Service Provider we are very
cognizant of the insecure nature of the Internet. As such, we have
numerous security practices in place:
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Security
coded into the border routers for IP address spoofing
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Firewalls
placed at strategic locations throughout the network.
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Numerous
hardware firewalls such as Cisco PIX, NetGear, Sonicwall, etc.
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Network
Intrusion Detection devices to detect suspicious activity
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Daily
scanning of key servers by an independent organization for the latest
vulnerabilities for all our
operating systems i.e. Windows, Linux, etc.
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Applying
vendor security patches promptly as and when they are announced.
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Ensuring
that our system administrators and technicians are up to date with the
latest security techniques
and issues.
Backup and Restore Services
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Internal server backup - our servers' system, data and user disk
drives are configured in RAID arrays (RAID1, RAID5, RAID10 etc.) to
protect against hardware failure of individual disk drives. In
addition, the server has an additional volume of suitable size where
daily and weekly backups are stored on an automated basis.
Restoration is manual, and could be either controlled by the Customer
or by CoastalDatalink.NET staff on request. Restoration times would
typically be anything from minutes to hours depending on the size of
the restore. The server’s disk drives are configured in RAID arrays
(RAID1, RAID5, RAID10 etc.) to protect against hardware failure of
individual disk drives. This methodology is best suited for non
mission-critical servers where a downtime of several hours or even a
day or so is tolerable.
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Backup
to an external storage array network (SAN) - All servers requiring
backup are connected to a central SAN (over a high-speed gigabit
network), which in turn consists of RAID disk arrays to protect
against disk drive failures, and is also backed up regularly to hard
disk. This has the advantage that each server does not need to have
additional internal storage space for backups, and the backup storage
is saved on a secure, protected device independent of the server.
For special needs CoastalDatalink.NET can make SAN space available in
chunks of 25GB, up to 4 terabytes of space, as well as other smaller
SAN devices and arrays.
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Backup
to an external hard drive or array library - This provides a
similar level of backup and recovery as an internal server backup, but
with the difference that the storage media is a removable external hard drive
which can be removed, cataloged and stored separately for indefinite
storage per our client's specifications and requirements.
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Backup
to hard disk with off-site storage - CoastalDatalink.NET can
arrange to have your data saved and shipped to a secure, off-site
facility for safe storage and recall, on a daily, weekly, monthly or
other schedule as desired by Customer.
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Backup
to a clustered server, in a “fail-over” configuration - The cluster
can be configured in “active-passive” or “active-active with load
balancing”. This would provide rapid recovery from server failures.
For more
information on our customized data storage and recovery services please contact
us at
sales@coastaldatalink.net
