Further Thoughts on DR
It feels nice to have something nice to say every now and then. I can’t praise Canavan’s book, Avoiding the Bullets (see previous post) enough – for two reasons. One, because he hits home in my experience with open source CMS, Joomla; the other, he is doing what every sys admin and developer ought to do: when you build a web site, or a piece of application code, or a system, network or storage platform, you should always think about the dark side — what could happen and what you can build into what you are developing to prevent disasters or to expedite recovery from them.
Too often DR provisions are bolted on after the platform has been built. This is a painful and expensive and often inefficacious approach. It is better to build DR in than to bolt DR on.
One minor error in Canavan’s book is worth noting, not because it reflects anything wrong with his thinking, but because it perpetuates a misinterpretation that has been floating around for years. The error is with the attribution of meaning to the Chinese term for disaster (actually for crisis).
The incorrect interpretation, which I used to reference all the time until my error was pointed out to me, is that the two pictograms/ideograms that create the word “disaster” in Chinese mean, literally, ”DANGER + OPPORTUNITY.” This is wrong.
The two symbols mean DANGER + A POINT IN TIME. Here is a good explanation from an expert on the language.
I find the correct interpretation much more compelling than the DANGER + OPPORTUNITY interpretation, since it is how we react to a crisis that determines whether it is a momentary inconvenience or a full blown Disaster with a capital “D.”
Don’t worry, Tom. I made the same mistake in the intro to my first book on DR and the misinterpretation seems to have a long cultural history.