The company who received this message was not comforted by it nor the subsequent calls into support.

The risk of hosting downtime is real. When shopping for a web hosting provider, take our sage words of advice before you sign on the dotted line:

1) Get a commitment in the form of a money backed guarantee or Service Level Agreement (SLA) about Restore Time Objective (RTO) AND Restore Point Objective (RPO). Commonly referred to as an SLA for RTO and RPO.

Here are some examples:

“We will have you back up in 60 minutes (RTO) from any failure and your data will be current to within 15 minutes (RPO) of the outage”

“We’ll have your system up and running 99.9% of every month, and if your outage time exceeds 1 hour, your credit is $x. If it exceeds 3 hours, your credit is $y. If it exceeds Z hours, you may cancel your agreement.”

Global Data Vault offers a great SLA with Advanced Data Protection which guarantees recovery within as little as 1 hour.

2) Global Data Vault recommends that users do NOT rely 100% on one cloud hosting provider – someone else – some completely unrelated company — should host the disaster recovery site.

Imagine if the above photo really read, “Regrettably, we got in a bit of a bind and failed to pay all of our (pick one): sales, payroll, property, income, use, franchise, excise tax – and would you believe our site has been padlocked by a mean guy with a badge, and he seems to think they are preparing our equipment for auction … at both of our sites (hosting and DR) in fact… and my nice new boat too.”

Okay so chances are you’d never know the real behind the scenes details about a site failure and website hosting downtime, but as outlandish as the above scenario seems, it does happen. We all still remember Enron and what a disaster that was. Imagine how much worse it would have been if Enron had been in the hosting business, and how many client businesses would have failed in their wake… Yeah, let that sink in for a second. Scary, huh.

Technology companies can grow at a rate unlike any other industry so it’s easy for them to get dizzy with the acceleration and make bad decisions, and perhaps even more prone to the dangers of management on the edge of reason. As per Jim Collin’s book, “How the Mighty Fall” and his 5 brilliantly observant stages of every corporate decline (not just the tech world):

Stage 1: Hubris Born of Success

Stage 2: Undisciplined Pursuit of More

Stage 3: Denial of Risk and Peril

Stage 4: Grasping for Salvation

Stage 5: Capitulation to Irrelevance or Death

Who would have thought all these companies would be gone from our landscape today? Zenith, Circuit City, Borders, Lehman Brothers. And more on teetering on the brink of absolution as well: Netscape and RIM. That’s why we think putting your eggs in a few different baskets (web and server hosts) is the best way to keep your data protected and avoid hosting downtime.

Global Data Vault is inherently interested in data protection and providing data backup solutions for when disk drives fail. Continuing in our series of weighing the differences between enterprise class disk drives and desktop class disk drives, we are now examining the causes for the inevitable failure of both those drives.

In our previous discussion of bad sector recovery and rotational vibration, we looked at how those two events can effect disk drive performance. Today we’re looking at two more usual suspects for a disk drive crash: misalignment detection and vibration sensors.

Misalignment detection

Most disk drives have what are called “servo wedges,” or embedded servo systems that do exactly that – they embed the feedback signals for the read/write head positioner inside the gaps or wedges in the data tracks of the disk. Embedded servo was originally developed in the 1970s, and started to appear on mass-market hard drives for personal computers in the late 1980s.

As with dedicated-servo drives, the control signals are written at the factory using a special device called a servowriter, and cannot usually be regenerated in the field. A desktop class drive often has a single or a few numbers of combined servo/data path processors or servo wedges. Having a single processor can pose a problem if the drive is incapable of embedding the signals to the servo, or determining the location of the head as it read or writes and waits for the target location in the media. This is where enterprise class drives are better, as they have servo and data path processors that have servo algorithms superior to that of desktop class drives.

It goes without saying that disk drives with errors in the servo areas are considered to be badly damaged and should be replaced whether it’s an enterprise class drive or desktop class drive.

Vibration sensors

Most enterprise class disk drives implement a vibration sensor circuit on the drive’s electronic board. These sensors can detect the movement of the drive when the servo is moving the heads, which provides a reliable method of positioning the heads and determining when it is safe to read or write data.

Desktop class disk drives feature less sophisticated mechanisms and that leads to vibration induced errors, which in turn prompt performance loss and a higher error rate. Enterprise class disk drives, on the other hand, are more effective when it comes to detecting vibrations. Enterprise class disk drives are outfitted with vibration sensor circuits which identify the movement of the drive, such as when the servo is shifting the head, which then provides data. They also have a closed loop feedback system among the magnetic head and the spindles that recognize the vibrational anomalies.

Lower drive performance, a greater number of logged medium errors, and a boost in the frequency of drives which have been marked offline by the I/O controller are some symptoms of errant vibration sensor sensors.

Whether your disk drive is plagued with bad sector recovery errors, rotational vibration issues, misalignment detection notices or rogue vibration sensors, one thing’s for certain: you need to have your disk drive backed up stat so that when it does fail, you’ll have no significant loss in data and you’ll be back in business in no time. A reliable online backup solution can give you the reassurance you need that even if your disk drive life is limited. Your data security is always be mission critical.

Computer hardware fails, and the result is often the loss of valuable data. At Global Data Vault, we have a front-row seat to this mayhem. To ensure your offsite backup solution provides recovery as you expect, you must make sure that all of your important data is included is what you select for backup.

Our main concern is that you have selected all of your critical data for offsite backup. And our purpose is not as much to tell you how to find this data – as this varies widely – but to provide a checklist for you to review at an executive level. It’s your responsibility to determine what data you need to protect. We want to help.

Here is a checklist to help you think though this critical process. If you have questions about your selections, contact our tech support team. Don’t wait.

Company wide data that is usually on a server:

• Financial Information: Systems that help you manage your accounting, your assets or your taxes maintain critical data that can be difficult and costly to recreate.
• Databases: You may use a database such as Access, SQL Server or Oracle for “line of business” applications or accounting, marketing or customer data.
• Email Servers: Some companies operate their own email systems using Microsoft Exchange or Lotus Notes or others.
• User Documents: Many companies keep a central repository of commonly used files and / or user created files such as documents and spreadsheets.
• Microsoft Windows System State: Having a system state backup enables a rollback of a failed update or upgrade for a server.
• Virtual Machines: The use of virtual machines has grown very quickly. You may be running several virtual servers in one physical server.

• Email: Email is a communication tool, but email is also used for document storage and retrieval, which can include documents such as invoices, receipts, memberships, and publications. Email applications are also used for calendaring, task lists and more. Email data is often stored is more than one place.
• Documents: By default, most user created files are saved to this important directory, making the My Documents folder another essential selection for offsite backup.
• Passwords: If you store a document on your computer with all of your passwords (possibly in an excel spreadsheet that is password protected), you need to include this document when backing up. However, be sure to save your offsite backup password and any optional encryption keys in an additional location other than your computer!
• Desktop: Many users save files and create directories on the desktop. Be sure to select this for offsite backup.
• Bookmarks: Bookmarks help us find important websites and pages. Be sure to select your bookmarks files for offsite backup.
• Pictures, Videos and Music: These files are taking on a key role in marketing today – they represent valuable and hard to replace data.

As we highlighted last week, it’s not a matter of IF your disk drive will fail, but WHEN. One key difference between enterprise disk drives and desktop disk drives is that even though enterprise class drives are designed to carry a heavy usage load, they still fail. But before they fail – they tell you they’re going to fail. Desktop disk drives or consumer class drives just quit with no warning.

So now that you have the bad news – your drive WILL fail you. Here’s a few reasons why your relationship with your disk drive will be so fleeting.

Bad Sector Recovery

Each disk drive has a small area on its surface called a sector, and each drive is made up of millions of sectors. Some disk drives may have bad sectors — even though that disk drive is brand new. Some sectors turn to the dark side during its operational lifetime.

A CRC or Cyclical Redundancy Check, is a code used to detect an accidental change with the drive that will often give the error of the bad sector. The system will double check to see if it’s provided the wrong result and try to read the sector again.

Desktop drives try to recover the bad sector. They will try to reread the sector in order to recover the data that was in the bad sector. The user, along with the operating system and application, has to wait for the system to respond when the drive withdraws. No disk access may be permitted as the system attempts to retry the command. This may take several agonizing minutes.

Enterprise drives on the other hand, provide a warning when they’ve had to recover too many bad sectors. These drives have an indicator light on the front of them that will light up to notify you it’s nearing the end of its life.

Using a desktop-class disk drive as an enterprise-class system is a mistake. A failed desktop drive is likely to be marked as offline more often, and could cause operating system crashes, kernel panics, or blue screens.

Rotational Vibration

Rotational vibration is measured in radians per second. A hard-drive disk will operate at 7200 rpm (rotations per minute) to 15000 rpm, and it should spin with minimal vibration. Much like a low-air tire on your car will cause your car to vibrate when driving to the point where it’s unsafe, a disk drive that’s experiencing rotational vibration can also cause panic and loss of use.

Vibrations often affect the disk drive performance. When the disk attempts to Read From or Write To a disk, the vibration can push the data out of the alignment with read/write data track. This increases the likelihood that an off-track write could corrupt data in an adjoining track, or that an off-track read could eventually result in incorrect data or data that cannot be located or read.

Enterprise class drives often sense the vibration motion of the drive and the heap position and track alignment, thus it gives better compensation for the vibration. Higher class drives provide the users a warning when the drives are experiencing rotational vibration.

The source of the vibration often comes from moving components such as fans and even neighboring hard drives. Other things that can cause rotational vibration are manufacturer’s defects, mechanical failure, age, mishandling—such as dropping the drive on floor.

Next up in our series of data protection – enterprise class drives vs desktop class disk drives: misalignment detection and vibration sensors.

Desktop drives similar to what you find in a personal computer system are generally designed for running client applications where much of the data is accessed across a network. The drive is only accessed to provide program or application access, access the swap file, or complete a limited data save or data retrieval for the operating system or running application. The user’s information is stored on a file or storage server. The disk I/O operations support operating system load and runtime requirements as well as program/application load and runtime requirements. These drives are used heavily during an 8 hour day, but are resting the other 16 hours.

Enterprise class drives work similarly, but under more extreme conditions. They run multiple enterprise applications and handle a higher workload with a greater emphasis on a reliability and availability. Enterprise Class Drives provide operating system and application load and runtime support, but they also may provide application and/or storage services to the network, which requires large capacity data storage that is always available and reliable. Enterprise class drives are often found in multiple drive RAID arrays.  In the 16 hours that the desktop class drive is resting, the enterprise class drive is generally working away.

Enterprise class drives are designed with heavy duty components and drive firmware programming to meet the rigors of this environment. Enterprise class drives process reads and writes all day, every day, 24/7. When building a business system that must be reliable for specific types of users, you may need higher quality disk drives that cost more.

Here’s a guide to sort it out:

The good news is that you can buy enterprise class hard drives from most any popular online computer merchant, but note that the enterprise class drive options may only make themselves available to you when you are purchasing a server. Online retailers are able to compete on price by supplying lower class drives that only last a year or two and are less costly. Keep in mind that the expense to replace desktop class drives, not to mention the time and user frustration that it requires to do, so can add up over time, whereas heavy users would benefit from the continuity of an enterprise class disk drive.

Lastly, always, always, always check your warranty for any disk drives you purchase. It’s not a matter of IF the disk drives will go bad, but when. Even enterprise-class drives fail with regularity.

At Global Data Vault, we plan for the imminent failure in a number of ways. First off, it is rare that at Global Data Vault that we own any hardware older than 5 years old. Secondly, we maintain a warm spares in the infrastructure that take over when needed and additional cold spares in big Tupperware containers to plug in when a warm spare automatically replaces a worn out drive.

The moral of this story is don’t buy on price without looking under the hood – and – caveat emptor – if a computer, especially a server, looks like a great deal, there may be reasons you don’t want to buy it. Don’t skimp if you actually need an enterprise class drive for your system. In the long run, you’ll be far better off.

Next up in the series:  Bad Sector Recovery and Rotational Vibration – how they effect your disk drive performance.

Chart information and supporting information provided by Intel.com

Each year, LSU also recognizes the business achievements of its alumni. Global Data Vault is honored to have been selected to the 2012 LSU 100 list of Fastest Growing Companies.

This is Global Data Vault’s second consecutive appearance on the LSU 100 list.

Will Baccich, GDV’s CEO and co-founder is a 1980 graduate of LSU and holds a Bachelor of Sciences degree in Computer Science.

Hundreds of companies from across the United States and internationally are nominated for this honor. The CEOs and owners of these companies are former LSU students — now business people – and hold degrees from nearly every college within the University.

As part of the yearly event, the honorees are invited back to campus to be collectively recognized later this month. There, they will be speaking with students in the business school about entrepreneurship and leadership.

Congrats to Global Data Vault and all the LSU Top 100 Fastest Growing Businesses of 2012!!!

For additional information about the LSU 100 or the Stephenson Entrepreneurship Institute, visit www.lsu100.com

Titled, “State of Business Continuity Preparedness,” 300 DRJ members shared their insights and fears into what puts their business continuity at risk:

• 61% of respondents were from organizations with 1,000 or more employees
• with revenues ranging from under $500 million to more than $10 billion
• and represented a variety of industries primarily from North America (82%).

Some of the key findings:

The top three reasons for increased risk to business continuity are:

• increased reliance on technology (48%)
• business organization complexity (37%)
• increasing frequency and intensity of natural disasters (36%)

The respondents’ indicated that the following issues are either currently addressed or they plan to address them in future business continuity planning (respondents were asked to select all that apply):

• IT failure (91%)
• Natural disaster/extreme weather (84%)
• Power outage (80%)
• Fire (79%)
• Telecommunication failure (75%)
• Epidemic/pandemic (72%)
• Flood (59%)
• Cyber attack or IT security incident (53%)
• Utility outage such as gas, water, sewer (53%)
• Employee health and safety incident (49%)
• Environmental accident (49%)
• Supply chain disruption (42%)
• Terrorist event 41%
• Negative publicity cover/damage to corporate reputation (33%)
• Sabotage (28%)
• Other (7%)

Strategies for workforce continuity or recovery include the following (the survey requested a “select all” response)

• Provision employees with remote access technologies so they can work remotely from a location with Internet access (81%)
• Use another internal site as an alternate site for work area recovery (69%)
• Arrange for mobile recovery units (23%)
• Subscribe to shared seats at a BC/DR service provider site (23%)
• Susbrcibe to dedicated seats at a BC/DR service provider site (15%)

In the past five years, respondents had to use their business continuity plan:

• Never (39%)
• Once (18%)
• Twice (15%)
• Greater than 5 (12%)
• Three times (10%)
• Four times (4%)
• Five times (2%)

Why did they have to implement their business continuity plan? The reasons:

• Natural disaster/extreme weather (55%)
• Power outage (49%)
• IT failure (36%)
• Flood (28%)
• Fire (18%)
• Telecommunication failure (14%)
• Utility outage (13%)
• Epidemic/pandemic (12%)
• Other (8%)
• Employee health and safety incident (7%)
• Environmental accident (7%)
• Cyber attack / IT security incident (4%)
• Terrorist event (3%)
• Negative publicity coverage / damage to corporate reputation (1%)
• Sabotage (0%)

The full survey is quite lengthy and informative. If you’d like to see the survey results in its entirely, visit here.

The good news is that some smart phones are safer than others.

But that also depends on how you’ve cared for it.

For example, Apple’s wildly popular iPhone is built on a restrictive platform that protects it from being vulnerable to viruses and malware being installed on it. Thank goodness.

iPhone

That all goes out the window however, if you’ve jailbroken your iPhone. To “jailbreak” one’s iPhone is to modify the phone’s operating system. People often do this when they have an older model phone and they want to install features that may be offered in a newer version than they currently own. “Jailbreaking” gives greater control over the device, including being able to remove the Apple-imposed restrictions to install apps from sites other than the official app store. Yet, it’s exactly the removal of those well-designed restrictions that takes the protective shield away from the iPhone’s operating system, and puts the smart phone at risk to hackers and thieves.

Note: do not jailbreak your iPhone.

It’s those hackers and thieves that have captured their prey lately in another highly popular smart phone: the Google Android phone. Forbes magazine reported earlier this month that there’s a new nasty virus attacking Droids that when installed, contains no malicious code and therefore goes undetected. But wait, there’s more. After a few hours or a few days, the sinister app downloads a new code from a remote server and hides the data transfer from the user. 

This black ops code, called “GingerBreak,” wrecks havoc for the user by granting complete access to the device, including any of the following:

• Reading data
• Listening through the microphone
• Calling paid phone numbers
• Installing additional apps
• Sending text messages to paid numbers
• Transfer money

And that’s the stuff that keeps IT departments tossing in their sleep – what a security nightmare for a highly mobile workforce.

Google has provided a patch for “GingerBreak” and as long as your device has been updated since May of last year, they maintain that you should be protected from this specific virus. Furthermore, Google has developed an internally utilized program called “Bouncer” that scans all apps uploaded to the Market. Bouncer checks for known malware and simulates the apps running on a device in an effort to evade future evolutions of the GingerBreak virus.

Unfortunately, hackers are resilient little buggers and will not be deterred. The risk of a mobile phone getting hacked is not going to go away, but you can reduce your risk of a phone hacking by doing the following:

1. Use passwords! Don’t use the same one for everything, or that can be easily guessed, or please, are the default passwords that came with the phone.
2. Keep your Smartphone updated. Sync it often so you don’t miss any important patches or operating system upgrades.
3. Employ remote phone security. If you lose your phone, remotely lock it down or wipe out the data.
4. Turn off your Bluetooth. Significant hacking occurs via Bluetooth.
5. Request that your voicemail require a password to access it. Hackers can very easily spoof your number and operate the voicemail without having to know your number.

And that fault has a serious tale to tell. Geologists have found sand deposits up and down the Pacific coast along this zone, the result of a tsunami a little over 300 years ago.

We agree, three hundred years is a long time and that bit of trivia in and of itself may not seem threatening, but pair it with what scientists now know about earthquake patterns, and the Pacific Northwest Coasters should be trembling in fear – or at least preparing for an impending disaster in the very near future.

“I think all subduction zones are guilty until proven otherwise,” Dr. Kerry Sieh told National Geographic in their February 2012 issue. Sieh, director of the Earth Observatory at Singapore’s Nanyang Technological University, is one of the world’s leading paleoseismologist. He spends his days obsessing over geologic records for evidence of ancient earthquakes and tsunamis, and identifies what he calls, “supercycles” or clusters of big earthquakes that occur at regular and predictable intervals.

While the most recent tsunami may have hit that region more than 300 years ago, recent evidence from seafloor sediment cores suggests that about 40 earthquakes have occurred along the Cascadia fault zone over the past 10,000 years, with an alarming average of one every 250 years; although some researchers estimate the recurrence interval at 500 years.

Scientists may not be in total agreement on the recurrence interval, but where there is a meeting of the minds is in their confidence that when the fault does rupture, the earthquake (or earthquakes) could be as large as the one that hit Japan in March just last year, and that the tsunami could reach the Oregon coast in 20 short minutes.

If that horrific event were to occur during prime summertime tourist season, it is expected to create widespread devastation and a massive numbers of casualties.

The most populated area of Washington State is Seattle, insulated on Puget Sound behind the Olympic Peninsula and likely harboring it from major harm. Alarmingly however, geologists are now discovering smaller, shallower cracks in the crust that extend under Puget Sound. They are unclear on how often those earthquakes occur but are suspecting the most recent occurred a thousand years ago. Those new-found cracks are especially disturbing in that a comparatively moderate tsunami starting off Seattle could be more damaging than a giant one off the main coast.

Washingtonians can hardly be in the dark with evacuation signs, information booklets and broadcast towers spotting their landscape. Even so, evacuation centers are rare and many residents do not have access to high ground – and would ultimately perish if such a disaster were to hit their coast. The smartest action to take is to prepare for the worst disaster – and do it now.

We are approaching the 1-year anniversary of the devastating tsunami that rocked Japan and the pacific rim. While countries affected by the massive disaster continue to struggle to recover, we can’t help but turn out thoughts closer to home and our own vulnerabilities to a similar fate.

Here is a list of a few link resources to help outline how you can start disaster planning for your coastal area for a tsunami-related event:

• How can I protect myself from a tsunami?
• Tsunami preparedness
• Red Cross Preparedness Fast Facts
• Tsunami Warnings: How to prepare

Southern California info:

• Tsunami preparation and evacuation maps
• Preparing for a tsunami

While the science is nowhere near exact, researchers are closely examining vulnerable areas of the world based on the theory that history does and will repeat itself. They have found what they refer to as “supercycles,” or clusters of big earthquakes occurring at regular intervals. It’s these underwater earthquakes that have the potential to create tsunamis of epic proportions.

Leading the supercycles charge is Dr. Kerry Sieh, currently serving as director of the Earth Observatory at Singapore’s Nanyang Technological University. Sieh is one of the world’s leading paleoseismologists studying earthquake patterns. He and his team have discovered that for at least the past 700 years, pairs of large earthquakes have occurred about every 200 years on a segment of the Sunda megathrust, a fault extending 3,300 miles from the southwestern side of Sumatra to the south of Java and Bali and ending near Australia. The earthquakes in each pair were separated by roughly 30 years. Sieh found there had been a pair of quakes around years 1350 and 1380, another pair in the early to mid 1600s, and a third pair n 1797 and 1833.

Based on that unique pattern, Sieh and his colleagues suspected back in 2004 that another deadly pair of earthquakes was coming. They began campaigning on the Mentawai Islands – located along the Sunda megathrust — to warn people of the horrific dangers of tsunamis. Five months later, Sumatra was wiped out. While Sieh received many accolades for predicting the event, he says the credit is not his as they actually anticipated the earthquake to occur along another portion of the fault. As you can imagine, many will defend that he’s onto something substantial.

In fact, if his theory is sound, you can put some money on the fact that the area will see another quake very likely within most of our lifetimes. The first of his originally predicted the earthquakes did happen in September 2007, producing a tsunami with waves thankfully of only 3 feet high. But remember, these monsters like to travel in pairs within 30 years of separation. He predicts another earthquake with a magnitude of 8.8 anytime between 2007 and 2037.

Read more about Dr. Sieh’s research here.