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Chapter 2: Disaster RecoveryPlanning for a Disaster Technical recovery teamDoes the actual technical recovery. As the recovery progresses, the original plan mayhave to be modified. This role must manage the changes and coordinate the technicalrecovery. Review and certification managerCoordinates and plans the post-recovery testing and certification with users.To reduce interruption of the recovery staff, we recommend you maintain a status board.The status board should list key points in the recovery plan and an estimate of when thesystem will be recovered and available to use. If the disaster is a major geographical event (like an earthquake), your local staff will bemore concerned with their families—not the company. Depending on the disaster, key personnel could be injured or killed.You should expect and plan for these situations. Plan for staff from other geographic sitesto be flown in and participate as disaster recovery team members.A final staffing role is to plan for at least one staff member to be “unavailable.” Without thisperson, the rest of the department must be able to perform a successful recovery. This issuemay become vital during an actual disaster.Disaster recovery scenarios can be grouped into two types: Onsite OffsiteOnsite recovery is disaster recovery done at your site. The infrastructure usually remainsintact. The best case scenario is a recovery done on the original hardware. The worst casescenario is a recovery done on a backup system.Offsite recovery is disaster recovery done at a disaster recovery site. In this scenario, allhardware and infrastructure are lost as a result of facility destruction such as a fire, a flood,or an earthquake. The new servers must be configured from scratch.A major consideration is that once the original facility has been rebuilt and tested, a secondrestore must take place back to the customer’s original facility. While this second restore canbe planned and scheduled at a convenient time to disrupt as few users as possible. Thetiming is just as critical as the disaster. While the system is being recovered, it is down.System Administration Made Easy2–7