Could someone provide us a list of reasonably comprehensive and
reliable resources (online and offline) that we can use as a basis to
develop some recommendations and a plan that can help us establish our
company’s current server setup into one that is appropriately
backed-up and well-prepared for emergencies and/or disaster-recovery
situations?

We do not expect the Researcher to perform the role of a full-service
consultant by providing a specific recommendation about the type of
environment we should attempt to establish. Instead we hope for a
solid foundation to begin doing our own research, with references to
resources that will help us to ask the right questions that lead to
the development of a plan that meets our business requirements.

We are not a major e-commerce retailer, and we do not depend on our
site to conduct business-critical transactions, however we do want
create a more dependable environment for our company’s web sites.

Without more information the reply is likely to be extremely generic,
so here is some more information about the current environment. The
servers we are concerned about are all Sun Solaris boxes and include:
a production server for our corporate web site, a database server with
an Oracle 9 installation, a staging server for the corporate site, a
fourth server hosting a different web site, and a fifth server hosting
an application on the corporate site. The machines are co-located at
an IBM hosting facility so we have the option to add many of the
services supplied by IBM. We will certainly review their extensive
documentation, but wish to supplement our review of those optional
services with our own research.

IMPORTANT: The resource list we are requesting should include some
fundamental/basic materials since our group does not include anyone
with a strong background in IT backup, fail-over preparation,
security, disaster-preparation and related areas. For example,
including resources that address appropriate ways to implement
mirroring, redundancy, and other types of backup options would be
beneficial.

Quick replies - even piecemeal - are appreciated.