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SOLUTIONS
WEBINAR
DR Runbooks in a Real Disaster
Stuff You Don’t Think About Until It’s Too Late
Americas Session
Wednesday, September 23 at 1:00pm EDT (UTC-4)
Most disaster recovery plans are built and tested against a single scenario: a clean, planned failover where applications can be quiesced, a final sync completed, and systems shut down in order. Unfortunately, real disasters rarely cooperate.
Too often teams discover mid-event that a server booting successfully does not mean an application is back in service. IP addresses, DNS records, and domain controllers were never revalidated for the recovery environment, and nobody defined what "recovered" means or who signs off before handing systems back to the business.
The result is a recovery that looks complete on the console, but isn't complete for the organization that depends on on it. Closing that gap requires a runbook built not only on replication, but dependency-aware sequencing, network and identity remapping, and a documented failback process.
In this webinar, RackWare engineers will outline the runbook oversights that can turn a planned failover into a chaotic recovery, and what a complete DR runbook needs to include to close those gaps before disaster strikes.
What You Will Learn
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Why a successful VM boot doesn't mean a recovered service, and how to sequence recovery across infrastructure, AD/DNS, networking, databases, middleware, and applications
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How Recovery Waves and automated boot-order sequencing enforce that dependency order, instead of leaving it to a manual checklist
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How to plan for both controlled failover (application quiescing, final sync, orderly shutdown) and catastrophic failure, including recovery from the latest consistent recovery point
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How application-aware, granular recovery points support a deterministic recovery, even when a clean final sync isn't possible
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Which network, DNS, identity, and access dependencies - IP changes, routing, firewall rules, domain controllers, credentials, load balancers, external dependencies - must be documented and validated before DR day
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How automated environment re-mapping handles IP, identity, and DNS changes during failover instead of surfacing them as post-recovery surprises
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How to structure recovery into dependency-based waves with clear ownership, RPO/RTO targets, and validation criteria
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How post-boot service verification confirms that an application and its interfaces are actually usable before handoff to application owners
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What a complete failback process includes: operating in DR, capturing changes, reversing replication, returning workloads to production, resuming protection, and incorporating lessons learned from every DR test - including how controlled, two-way sync supports a clean cutback without re-exposing the organization to data loss
Presented by
Naresh Kanna Samiappan
Senior System Engineer
Naresh Kanna Samiappan is a Senior System Engineer at RackWare with more than 10 years of experience delivering enterprise migration and disaster recovery solutions. He works closely with
customers on the design, implementation, testing, and troubleshooting of large-scale DR and migration projects across AWS, Google Cloud, Oracle Cloud, IBM Cloud, VMware, and datacenter environments.
With deep hands-on experience in RackWare RMM, cloud infrastructure, virtualization, and disaster recovery operations, Naresh has led and supported complex customer projects from proof of concept through production deployment. His focus is on building practical, repeatable recovery solutions that help organizations move beyond simply replicating workloads to ensuring applications, infrastructure dependencies, recovery procedures, and operational runbooks are ready when a real disaster occurs.