Speech Server Disaster Recovery Overview
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What happens if a natural disaster or simple hardware failure causes Speech Server to stop responding to user commands? Would you lose data? Could you recover? How long would it take? A well-planned disaster recovery plan protects your valuable data by ensuring that you can quickly recover lost data.
A disaster recovery plan includes those actions that must occur in response to a catastrophic event. Develop your backup and restore strategies with appropriate resources and personnel and then test them. A disaster recovery plan should ensure that all your systems and data can be quickly restored to normal operation in the event of a natural disaster such as a fire or a technical disaster such as a disk failure.
Note
This topic explains which types of files you should regularly back up to recover from a loss of data in your Speech Server environment. It is not intended to be a step-by-step manual for developing a disaster recovery plan. You can find procedures and checklists for backup, restore, and disaster recovery in Microsoft Windows Server 2003 Help or see Backing Up and Recovering Data.
Your disaster recovery plan relates directly to your implemented deployment plan. As you think of disaster recovery, consider your deployment structure and its unique backup requirements:
- Is your deployment large-scale, handling thousands of calls each day, or is it small-scale, receiving relatively few calls?
- Does your deployment require that you back up log files, which can grow quite large? Do you have enough hard disk space to back up both log files and databases. Do you have the proper removable hardware to which you can transfer those files?
- What is an acceptable downtime limit for your deployment? Excessive downtime can lead to loss of sales, productivity, and customer goodwill.
- How will the disaster recovery be administered? Will several departments be responsible for various actions or will it all be handled by one central administrator?
For more information about deployment, see Deployment.
Thoroughly test your disaster recovery plan before deploying Speech Server in a production environment. When testing, look for vulnerable areas by simulating as many possible failure scenarios as you can. Be sure to verify your disaster recovery plan through the simulation of a catastrophic event.
Remarks
- Use Microsoft Windows Event Viewer daily to check both the system log and application log on your production servers for any errors or warnings. For more information, see How to: Monitor Speech Server with Event Viewer.
- Maintain a current Windows Emergency Repair disk or Automated System Recovery (ASR) disk set for each server in your deployment. ASR is primarily responsible for capturing system state and does not backup data files. You can create an ASR disk set by using the Advanced mode in Backup. For more information, see Create an Automated System Recovery.
- Ensure that all your servers are protected with anti-virus software and keep the software updated with the latest virus signature files. Use the Automatic Update feature of your anti-virus application to keep the virus signatures current. For more information, see Speech Server Environment Security.