A Strong and Stable OpenEdge Environment

In today’s “new economy” you have to make the best of everything you have.  This is even more critical when it comes to making your environment as strong and stable as you can.  Ensuring your environment is running optimally and not speeding towards the cliff is critical to your business doing the best it can.

This is especially important when you are working on Disaster Recovery plans.  Businesses are having a hard enough time making ends meet and staying in business without the additional challenge of losing data or a critical business system.

Disaster Recovery, from my perspective, is a timeline.  Along this timeline is developing your application, testing your application, deploying your application, and managing your application.  This timeline ties very nicely into the four phases defined for Emergency Management in the National Incident Management System (NIMS).  Although this information is for the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) in the United States, there are similar links for agencies in your region and country.

The four phases of emergency management are Mitigation, Preparedness, Response, and Recovery.  Although Emergency Management deals with man-made and natural disasters, the same concepts can also be applied to application management and Disaster Recovery Planning.

Mitigation is the process of eliminating and minimizing the effects of the disaster.  This is most critical in the development and deployment section of application management. 

Preparedness is the process of planning your DR plan and what the contingency is in the event of a disaster happening.  This is where a business impact analysis (BIA) determines what SHOULD be done to prepare for a disaster.

Response involves who is responsible for what in the event of a disaster striking.  In your business you should know who is going to make decisions, who is going to execute on those decisions, and who is going to DOCUMENT what is going on and what is being done.

Recovery involves returning the business to either partial or full capacity.  This may mean failing back to the production environment, like OpenEdge Replication can do.  It also involves getting your disaster recovery location up and running.  Whether this is utilizing Progress’ technology or something else, recovery requires that the business is running and doing the critical functions needed to stay in business.

It is important to understand that this process is a circular chain.  Disaster Recovery Planning is never done and is an iterative process.
 
Progress is committed to providing you with the tools to make your environment as efficient and safe as possible.  To this end, Progress will soon release OpenEdge Management 10.2A.  This release will include a new tool to help you remotely manage operations – OpenEdge Explorer (OEE). 

OpenEdge Explorer will provide an alternative to Progress Explorer as the configuration and management tool for the OpenEdge environment.  You will no longer have to install a Progress client to be able to graphically configure your OpenEdge environment.  You will also be able to monitor the current status of your systems from a browser anywhere on your intranet.

Additional free online training for Emergency Management and NIMS is available here.

This blog was an interrupt from my normal stream.  I would love to hear what you want to hear about and talk about from the Disaster Recovery world (or Emergency Management, Business Continuity, etc.).

In my next blog I will return to my normal process.

Until then, recovery from a disaster starts with the individual – are you ready?

Brian B