Planning a disaster recovery solution for Project Server 2007

This Office product will reach end of support on October 10, 2017. To stay supported, you will need to upgrade. For more information, see , Resources to help you upgrade your Office 2007 servers and clients.

Topic Last Modified: 2016-11-14

When planning a disaster recovery solution, it is important to consider both your recovery point objective (RPO) and recovery time objective (RTO).

The RTO specifies how long it is acceptable for your system to be offline. Longer RTOs allow for more leeway in bringing replacement hardware online.

The RPO specifies how much data loss is acceptable. Longer RPOs allow for greater leeway in recovering to earlier points in time.

If your organization has an RPO of more than twenty hour hours and your system has quiet time at night when you can back up the databases without having to worry about synchronization, you may want to consider using SharePoint Products and Technologies tools as part of your disaster recovery solution. Shorter RPOs and RTOs are better served by Microsoft SQL Server tools, which allow for faster database recoveries and more options for point-in-time recovery.

It is important to understand how backup and recovery of your Microsoft Office Project Server 2007 deployment fits in with the needs of your organization and the other software applications that you deploy.

The technologies that you use for fault tolerance and recoverability will vary according to the needs of your organization. You must weigh the cost of downtime against the cost of recovery. You should also account for the ease with which lost data can be replaced in a variety of failure scenarios, and the cost of lost goodwill with customers and other organizations caused by system downtime.

Planning a disaster recovery solution involves the following steps:

• Managing risk

• Determining cost of availability

• Determining acceptable downtime

• Determining return on investment

Managing risk

Risk management involves engaging in a broad range of activities to identify, control, and mitigate risks. IT planners should use risk management to identify vulnerabilities so that appropriate controls can be put in place either to prevent disasters from happening or to limit the effects of a disaster.

A risk assessment for your Office Project Server 2007 deployment should identify system vulnerabilities, threats, and current controls and attempt to determine the risk based on the likelihood and the impact of a threat.

When assessing risk for your disaster recovery strategy, consider the following:

• Cost

• Allowable outage time

• Security

• Integration with larger, organization-level contingency plans

When planning a highly available Office Project Server 2007 environment, consider all available alternatives and measure the risk of failure for each alternative. Evaluate the costs of each alternative against its risk factors and the impact of downtime on your organization.

After you evaluate risks versus costs, and after you design and deploy your system, your IT staff will require guidelines and plans of action in case a system failure does occur.

Determining cost of availability

When you implement more sophisticated options to improve the availability of your Office Project Server 2007 deployment, costs can rise dramatically.

Cost versus data loss exposure

Using clustering technologies, log shipping, standby servers, or even standby data centers will improve availability and also lessen data loss exposure. However, in a small deployment or a deployment in which data can be recreated easily, data loss exposure may not be a critical consideration. For larger deployments that use more complex Office Project Server 2007 features, recreating lost data can be time-consuming and costly. The risk of data loss in such a case can justify investing in technologies for high availability.

Cost versus availability

To develop a successful disaster recovery plan, you must understand when your data needs to be accessible and the potential impact of data loss on your business. Answering the following questions can help you determine your availability requirements and sensitivity to data loss:

• What are your availability requirements? What portion of each day must Project Server be online?

• What is the financial cost of downtime to your business?

• If you experience media failure, such as a failing disk, what is the maximum acceptable downtime?

• In case of a disaster, such as the loss of a server in a fire, what is the maximum acceptable downtime of your Office Project Server 2007 deployment?

• How important is it to never lose changes to your data?

• How easy would it be to re-create lost data?

• Does your organization employ system or database administrators?

• Who will be responsible for performing backup and recovery operations, and how will they be trained?

You can determine technical and financial tradeoffs for your availability solution based on your answers to these questions.

Determining acceptable downtime

You can measure the costs of replacing lost hardware easily. However, it is more difficult to assess the total cost of downtime that occurs when a computer running Office Project Server 2007 experiences a failure. Excessive downtime can result in many business losses, including the loss of sales, loss of customer goodwill, loss of productivity, loss of competitiveness, missed contractual obligations, and increased costs resulting from the need to make up these losses. Therefore, you and your management team should agree in advance on what the acceptable amount of downtime is for your Office Project Server 2007 deployment. This agreement is called a service-level agreement (SLA). After you establish a service-level agreement, you can determine the Office Project Server 2007 deployment and server configurations that best meet the requirements for that agreement.

Determining return on investment

Creating a highly available Office Project Server 2007 deployment might require a combination of new or costly hardware solutions, additional staff, and support staff for non-peak hours. As you determine how important it is to maintain availability in your Office Project Server 2007 environment, consider whether the added availability is worth the cost.

Disruption cost and recovery cost crossover

Analyze the effects of an outage over time to identify the maximum allowable time that users of a resource can be denied service before the outage prevents or inhibits the performance of an essential function. Also analyze the effects of the outage across related resources and dependent systems to identify any cascading effects that may occur as a disrupted system affects other processes that rely on it.

The point at which the cost of a disruption and the cost of recovery meet represents the amount of investment that your organization should make in a disaster recovery solution.

Download this book

This topic is included in the following downloadable book for easier reading and printing:

• Plan for disaster recovery in Project Server 2007

See the full list of available books at Downloadable content for Project Server 2007.