Disaster Recovery in the Cloud
Disclaimer: The enterprise Infrastructure as a Service(IaaS) that I will be using is for offered by the company I work for. I have been there 10 years and I am proud of our product set so I may be a little bias. However, these steps should be similar for most IaaS offerings like that of Amazon, GoGrid and RackSpace. To learn more about the product that is demo’d from visit http://theenterprisecloud.com We also have a similar hour based service at http://vcloudexpress.terremark.com. All that said, pay more attention the concepts not so much the platform. This is not meant as a commercial.
DR is important. However, it is worth a presence in a separate data center(DC)? That is a business decision that will not be covered in this article. Let’s say that the business cannot justify the cost based on the likelihood of the risk but they want to do something. In the past, your options short of a full DR presence ranged from offsite tapes to logshipping within the same data center to DR services like Sun Guard. All of these have shortcomings but if the business is ok with the risks and you set proper expectations on the level of protection and time to recover then that is all you can do.
Enter Cloud Computing(Specifically IaaS)
With IaaS, you can keep an online copy of your data in the cloud with minimal latency. The main advantage is cost and the savings can be huge. You do not have to invest in the infrastructure that goes along with a DR site like cabinets, network gear, and support services like AD, DNS, backups, etc. There is also the CapEX that goes with the actual server hardware.
The speed of implementation can also allow you to have many less virtual machines than you would have to have if they were physical machines. You can just keep a master copy of a web and each kind of app server. If you fail over to the DR cloud, you can spin up 10 or 20 of these really fast. Of course to have low latency with your data, your DB tier will have to be fully implemented.
This just a quick diagram of what you could do. In the event of catastrophe, you can flip DNS to the DR cloud in be up in much less time that not having a DR presence. In the second and final part of the series, we will look at the actual steps in setting up DR in the Cloud with SQL Server Database Mirroring.
This content is published under the Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 Unported license.
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