John Savill Master Series Part 6: Backups, Disaster Recovery, Failover Clusters, and Protection for Your Infrastructure

Part 6: Backups, Disaster Recovery, Failover Clusters, and Protection for Your Infrastructure

As an organization’s IT infrastructure grows and becomes distributed over many locations the need for protection and the ability to continue offering services—even with the loss of a site—becomes critical. This class will focus on technologies that enable services to scale and become highly available, even across locations.

Session 1: Where to Use Backups vs. DR vs. Clustering and How They Work - 69 min
The session will focus on key technologies that can help make services resilient to failure. We’ll offer a comparison of where each technology works best. We’ll cover backups, VSS, clustering, network load balancing, and replication—as well as best practices to implement Disaster Recovery and to test regularly to ensure that when you need it your Disaster Recovery plan will actually work.

Session 2: Using Virtualization Recovery Processes in Your Datacenter - 59 min
Virtualization is a great advancement to datacenters, consolidating operating systems onto a smaller number of physical boxes and providing the foundation for services such as the private cloud. However, the consolidation onto a fewer number of physical boxes can magnify the effect of a single hardware failure. This session will look at how virtualization features can increase availability and how the virtualization technologies work. We’ll cover high availability for virtual machine workloads and provide guidance for when you should use the various technologies.

Session 3: How to Use Backups and Replication to Provide Local and Remote Site Protection - 57 min
This session will look at the options for providing disaster recovery for an organization and how to implement and test your disaster recovery plan. We’ll explore traditional backup restoration processes and then discuss replication options and how to automate failover using technologies such as PowerShell and System Center Orchestrator. We’ll also look at key processes needed to keep your disaster recovery process functional and ensure key systems are always protected.