Pro SharePoint Disaster Recovery and High Availability, Second Edition

Book description

Few IT professionals take the time to learn what needs to be known to do disaster recovery well. Most labor under the pretense that good administration equals close to five-nines uptime. Most technical people do not see the value of planning for disasters until the unexpected has already happened, and the effects of a disaster involving a SharePoint farm—which today houses business information, line-of-business applications, sensitive information, extranets, and other highly important assets—can be staggering.

Pro SharePoint Disaster Recovery and High Availability, Second Edition will take you through a step-by-step process to show how to build an awareness and reaction plan for the inevitable. With a focus on real-world experiences and war stories, author Stephen Cummins weaves an expert tale of woe response and offers you:

  • Ways to see the warning signs of disaster, and ways to avoid it

  • Ways to respond to a disaster while it is happening

  • Perhaps most importantly, how to develop a plan to deal with disaster when it inevitably does happen

  • What you'll learn

    With Pro SharePoint Disaster Recovery and High Availability, Second Edition, learn and discover:

  • How to build resilience and high availability into your systems to make them less likely to fail

  • How to use technologies like log shipping, clustering and mirroring to replicate data

  • How to use redundancy of web front-ends, service applications and other parts of your SharePoint farm to prevent failure

  • How companies that realize the cost of disasters create processes to prevent them by tracking and responding to "near-misses"

  • How to implement the right monitoring tools to ensure you are alerted to impending problems as soon as possible

  • How to diagnose and repair broken systems, and develop processes to ensure you have backups and a place to restore them to if all else fails

  • Who this book is for

    If you worry about what would happen to your organization if what is in your SharePoint farm was lost, this book is for you. It is a technical book, but parts of it are about the principles of good planning. Other parts are stories of how things have gone wrong (and right) in the field—all of which should be instructive and entertaining for anyone who relies on any technology a great deal in their daily life.

    Table of contents

    1. Title Page
    2. Dedication
    3. Contents at a Glance
    4. Contents
    5. About the Author
    6. About the Technical Reviewer
    7. Introduction
    8. CHAPTER 1: Steering Away from Disaster
      1. The Real Cost of Failure
      2. Why Disasters Happen and How to Prevent Them
      3. High Availability: The Watertight Compartments
      4. Disaster Recovery
      5. SharePoint in the Cloud
      6. Practical Steps to Avoid Disaster
      7. Applied Scenario: The System Is Slowing Down
      8. Applied Scenario: It’s Never Simple
      9. Summary
    9. CHAPTER 2: Planning Your Plan
      1. Getting the Green Light from Management
      2. Barriers to Consensus
      3. Business Impact Assessment
      4. Physical Dependencies
      5. Disaster Coordination
      6. Summary
    10. CHAPTER 3: Activating Your Plan
      1. Welcome to the University of Newbridge
      2. Applied Scenario: A Disaster Recovery Plan
      3. Summary
    11. CHAPTER 4: High Availability
      1. High Availability Overview
      2. Resilience
      3. Redundancy
      4. Summary
    12. CHAPTER 5: Quality of Service
      1. Why Quality of Service Is Essential
      2. Perceptions and Causes of Poor QoS
      3. Applied Scenario: Flowers and Elephants
      4. Centralized vs. Regional SharePoint Deployment
      5. Cache
      6. Summary
    13. CHAPTER 6: Back Up a Step
      1. Backup Planning and Preparation
      2. Backup Using SharePoint
      3. Backup Using SQL Server
      4. Backup of the File System
      5. Summary
    14. CHAPTER 7: Monitoring
      1. Maintenance Tasks
      2. Monitor Reliability and Performance with Windows
      3. Summary
    15. CHAPTER 8: DIY DR
      1. The Recycle Bin
      2. Versioning As a Recovery Tool
      3. Recovering Sites and Site Collections
      4. Office As DIY DR Tool
      5. Content Backup Using Templates
      6. Summary
    16. CHAPTER 9: Change Management and DR
      1. Entropy
      2. Application Lifecycle Management
      3. Evolution
      4. Change Management
      5. Summary
    17. CHAPTER 10: DR and the Cloud
      1. SharePoint Time Machine
      2. Cloud Benefits
      3. Cloud Architectures
      4. Architecting for Disaster Recovery in the Cloud
      5. Summary
    18. CHAPTER 11: Best and Worst Practices
      1. JFD
      2. Quagmires
      3. Change Management
      4. Governance
      5. Summary
    19. CHAPTER 12: Final Conclusions
      1. Key Points by Chapter
      2. Summary
    20. Index

    Product information

    • Title: Pro SharePoint Disaster Recovery and High Availability, Second Edition
    • Author(s): Stephen Cummins
    • Release date: September 2013
    • Publisher(s): Apress
    • ISBN: 9781430263289