Windows OS High Availability (HA) is a tricky part of your disaster recovery (DR) planning. Many Microsoft and third-Party server tools and platforms come with some form of native HA toolset, and for the larger portion of these, Microsoft Cluster or Failover Clustering (Server 2003 and 2008, respectively) are the tool of choice. Enterprises may be surprised to find, though, that clustering alone is not sufficient to meet the needs of enterprise DR when you really look at it. ...
As a Disaster Recovery (DR) professional, I cannot tell you how many of my clients focus only on the server systems when they do DR planning. Every server must be accounted for, protected, backed up and ready to be brought back online if they lose the physical site that hosts the production system. The problem is that this approach leaves out two-thirds of the total DR planning that the modern organization must do in order to survive a site disaster. Technology is not a small part of your IT DR planning, but it is only one part...
Recovery point objective (RPO) metrics are commonly defined as how much data a system can afford to lose without endangering business processes. Let's face facts: Some applications require zero-data-loss protection both within one site and between sites. These applications move millions of dollars or potentially company-crashing information in every byte they process, and so justify the complexity and cost of zero-byte RPO. ...
Working for a disaster recovery solutions designer is often difficult. After being bombarded by ad slogans, magazine articles and just plain life experience, many company executives are looking to achieve a mythical figure for server uptime. Perceived uptime of 99.999 percent -- or "five nines" -- equates to about five minutes and 30 seconds of unexpected downtime per year, and the number is achievable. ...