Pro SharePoint 2013 Administration - EBook Free Download

Chapter 5Health Monitoring and DisasterRecoveryAs more and more organizations deploy SharePoint within an enterprise, and user adoption of the SharePointsolutions snowballs with each deployment, disaster recovery becomes very important. SharePoint 2013 has thecapability to host terabytes of important data, so backup of this data is likely to be high on the agenda for any IT groupthat maintains SharePoint in an organization.SharePoint includes capabilities to make backup and restoration easier than in the past, and SharePointcontinues to provide good backup and restore functionality to maintain the integrity of important data. I devote alarge chunk of this chapter to the administration of disaster recovery features in SharePoint 2013, but, as the titlesuggestions, this chapter also contains details on health and monitoring of a SharePoint 2013 infrastructure.SharePoint provides extensive logging, but previous versions before SharePoint 2010 lacked some key monitoringfunctionality that administrators require to ensure that their SharePoint solution is operating at peak performance.Administrators of SharePoint 2007 could consult the ULS logs and the Windows event log, but these features requirea certain amount of proactive behavior from the SharePoint administrator. SharePoint 2010 and 2013 includesophisticated health and monitoring features to alert the administrator when SharePoint is feeling a little underthe weather.After reading this chapter, any SharePoint administrator will, I am confident, be able to provide his or herorganization with the peace of mind that its data integrity is intact and that the organization can count on bounceback of its SharePoint service in the event of downtime or disaster.Planning for Disaster RecoveryIt is never a happy day for the IT group when an online service goes down, and this includes SharePoint. As fantasticas SharePoint is, it is inevitable that at some point in the life cycle, your SharePoint solution will suffer from downtime.Of course, downtime may occur for any number of reasons: human error, underlying hardware failure, power outage,faulty customizations, and so on. Since failure cannot be entirely averted, your role as a SharePoint administrator isto account for such downtime and restore service to the users of the platform in a timely manner. Planning for andrecovering from loss of service is what I refer as to as planning for disaster recovery.Minimizing downtime and averting loss in a disaster involves proactive processes and planning. Thoseunfortunate readers who have experienced loss of data are likely all too familiar with data backup, which is one aspectof disaster recovery—I will discuss managing content and data integrity shortly in this chapter. Another importantaspect of disaster recovery includes techniques to minimize service downtime.Minimizing downtime of a service factors both the total time to recover the service and the point in time fromwhich recovery resumes. In short, if recovery consists of restoring data in a SharePoint site collection because ofdatabase corruption, then the time to restore the database from backup and the time when the last backup took placeare both important factors for the success of restoration of the SharePoint site collection. A speedy restore is one thing,www.it-ebooks.info105