No-one expects disaster but we can plan for it. As Business Intelligence becomes an integral part of an organizations decision making processes it becomes as operational as any other system to the proper functioning of the business. This dependence by the business means that the outage of the BI system will have a negative impact in critical areas such as finance, customer service, or deliver expectations.

As with other operations systems the BI systems should go through rigorous testing, quality assurance, provided failover, and tested against the disaster recovery needed for business continuance.

With the BusinessObjects Enterprise XI platform there is a close interdependence between the database and the file system files. Normally backups are handled by independent backup systems for the database and the files. This normally also means that there a different teams involved in the two backups. In addition to the confirmation that backups are being complete there needs to be a clear understanding of all team members on how to restore those backups to minimize the impact of the system restore.

– In the case where a single applications documents are accidentally deleted the restoration of the entire system would also erase any work done by all users.

– Backup is performed at 12 AM midnight and system crashes at 10 AM. You have the potential to lose
everything done in those 10 hours especially if you do a blank restore.

Using the list in the White Paper you can prepare by developing and testing an internal approach to the most common problems that result in the need for a restore, so that you can avoid the surprises of teams being unfamiliar with your BOE systems.

www.mcmanusconsulting.com/articles/Disaster Recovery 2010.pdf