Sometimes paranoia pays. When we're asked about PMS and front desk hardware, we've given the same advice for a while now, and I've used the same illustration to explain the importance. And a week ago the worst-case scenario that I've described many times came true for one of our clients.
If your PMS server fails on a Friday after 5pm, the soonest you may be able to reach the manufacturer is Monday morning. Most likely, your repair or replacement will take until Wednesday to have in place. That's five days of trying to run your property on paper!
The simplest answer is to ensure that at least ONE of your other workstations uses hardware identical to the server. That generally adds $100-500 to your hardware costs (since the workstation probably needs less power), but it can put you back in operation in less than an hour instead of nearly a week. By moving the hard drive from the server to the identically equipped workstation, you can have your server back. You'll be short a workstation, but that computer wouldn't have been much help without the server.
You do need to take one additional precaution - make sure that you are backing up your data and make sure that your backups are rotated off-site so that a fire or flood cannot render your system unrecoverable. And remember - your backup is only as good as your ability to restore from it, which you can only be sure of by doing a test restore at least once per year. That can be a pain to schedule, but I have yet to see a disaster that was scheduled.
- Matt
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