Disaster recovery covers a multitude of options from a simple tape back-up of historical data through to a complete geographic staff re-location in the case of a major incident such as fire, theft or flood. The extent of disaster recovery planning is generally related to the allocated budget and relative size of the company or user base.

However, no matter how it occurs, the failure of a central fileserver or a group of fileservers can be both expensive and disruptive and therefore many businesses are now actively developing disaster recovery and business continuity plans to safeguard a disruption of work occurrence.

Business Continuity & High Availability

Business continuity could be defined as the capability of an IT system or server(s) to have a degree of operational continuity to overcome a downtime event. High availability refers to a system or component that is continuously operational for a desirably long length of time.

Commonly, this type of solution succeeds by having an identical secondary "mirrored" system which takes a passive role within the infrastructure but which can be activated immediately whenever a system failure occurs or is imminent. Ideally the active system should be continually monitored so that in the event of a failure, the user base can be seamlessly switched over to the back-up system with the minimum amount of downtime and disruption, and without the loss of any data.

Hampshire Business Computers currently have business continuity solutions deployed within their customer base and have expertise and experience within this emerging technology.

For information on business continuity please click here or visit the site portal at