Even the most expertly-designed and meticulously-maintained system architectures are subject to occasional failure, and any downtime you have to spend troubleshooting and testing can quickly add up to significant business losses. ERP Suites can help by providing experienced JD Edwards CNC and infrastructure assistance to get you back on your feet quickly, and with minimal data loss, through our disaster recovery service.
The following are a few of the more common questions we receive about disaster recovery.
How Do I Get ERP Suites Disaster Recovery Assistance?
If you’re a hosted ERP Suites customer, or you participate in our JD Edwards managed services program, disaster recovery is available to you as an add-on to your managed services contract.
Will You Help Us Create a Disaster Recovery Plan?
Our team will work with your personnel to design a plan that targets your chief concerns and goals in a manner that is clear, comprehensive, and mutually agreeable. If we’re hosting your environment, the heavy lifting will be on our side. You would be chiefly responsible for testing once we let you know that JD Edwards and its supporting databases are back online. On the other hand, if we’re not actually hosting the environment, we’ll need to identify and detail the responsibilities to be undertaken by both our team and yours in the event of an outage.
What Is Your Disaster Recovery Strategy with Hosted Systems?
Many disaster recovery vendors design their services around infrastructure recovery. By contrast, ERP Suites is focused on functional and application recovery so our customers can regain access to their data and business can proceed with negligible interruption. With hosted systems, we utilize mirrored SAN (Storage Area Network) technology—specifically real-time SAN-to-SAN replication. This means that your data is always being replicated on a backup network (located in a separate data center) virtually as soon as you generate it. If the primary network should go down, we can then immediately fail over to the backup network, and your operations can continue while we troubleshoot the issue with the primary network. Ideally, you should lose less than a minute’s worth of data in the event of a problem, unless you happen to be processing an unusually large number of transactions at the time of the outage.
We test disaster recovery preparations annually with all our customers. If, for whatever reason, a disaster recovery test fails to achieve its required objectives, we’ll refine and repeat testing until the results are satisfactory. In the past, most disaster recovery failures have resulted from network changes on the customer side that somehow impacted the recovered environment or else blocked user access. For this reason, we conduct an annual overview of your systems along with our disaster recovery testing to identify and assess any changes that may have been made on your side of the network since the previous test cycle. This allows us to adjust the scope, planning, and execution of your disaster recovery plan to ensure that we cover all your business requirements at the application level.
Disaster recovery efforts focus on two primary objectives: RPO (Recovery Point Objectives) – that is, restoration of your data relative to the point of the outage, and RTO (Recovery Time Objectives) – meaning the overall time of the outage. Since adopting a SAN-based replication strategy years ago, all our disaster recovery tests have achieved RPO with no more than 15 minutes of data loss. In most instances, there was no data loss at all.
What are the Benefits of Combining Disaster Recovery with Managed Services?
Managing your ERP environment familiarizes our JD Edwards CNC and infrastructure teams with your system architecture and helps us get to know your personnel, your day-to-day operations, and your unique business challenges and objectives. We can then leverage this knowledge to better customize your disaster recovery plan and, in the event of an actual outage, assist you more quickly and efficiently. Over time, we can also use your accumulated system history data to better anticipate and mitigate issues that could potentially disrupt your operations, affording you a proactive rather than solely reactive disaster recovery support strategy.
Simply put, your participation in our managed services program allows us to keep a finger continually on the pulse of your JD Edwards environment.
Has ERP Suites ever had to Recover from an Actual Disaster?
Yes, and we were able to do so successfully. Several years ago, we suffered a disaster that impacted a customer hosted in our primary data center. We successfully executed a recovery based on our disaster recovery plan and testing. The customer was able to resume normal business operations running out of our DR data center and once service was restored in the primary data center, we successfully returned to normal operations in the primary data center.
Eric Oss
Eris Oss has been implementing and supporting business systems for more than three decades. He cut his teeth on data entry and explored a variety of roles at JD Edwards before joining ERP Suites as a service delivery manager. This vast experience helps him connect with customers and business requirements at every level of IT and deliver targeted technical solutions.
