Planning Ahead: Disaster Recovery, Business Continuity & Application Availability
1. Planning Ahead:
Disaster Recovery / Business Continuity
& Application/Service Availability
A 360-Degree Approach
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2. Outages Happen
San Diego
Thursday, September 8, 2011
Photo Credits: San Diego Union Tribune
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3. Common Causes of Downtime
Source: Forester Research, Inc. 2007
Risk/Cause of Disaster % of Respondents who declared disasters
Power failure 42%
IT hardware failure 31%
Network failure 21%
IT software failure 16%
Human error 16%
Flood 12%
Hurricane 10%
Fire 7%
6%
Winter storm
Terrorism 4%
Earthquake 3%
Tornado 2%
Chemical spill 1%
Have not declared a disaster 24%
Infrastructure ManMade
27% of respondents declared at least one disaster in the past five years IT Specific- HW Natural
IT Specific - SW None
42% of respondents indicated that a power failure was the cause of their most significant disruption
4. Reasons for Planning Ahead…
High Expectations for High Availability
• Customers expect supplies and
services will continue or resume
rapidly in ALL situations
• Shareholders expect
management control to remain
operational throughout a crisis
• Suppliers expect revenue
streams to continue
• Regulatory Agencies expect
requirements to be met,
regardless of circumstance
• Insurance Companies expect
due care to be exercised
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9. Physical Diversity
Don't put all your eggs in one basket…
• Two (or more) physically separate locations
– Far enough apart so a natural disaster doesn't
affect all locations.
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11. Network Availability
Accessibility with routing alternatives…
• Ideally your Internet traffic and IP addresses
will be routed through the best paths, and in
an emergency you will be able to terminate
nonfunctional routes.
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12. Network Availability
Prepare for other hazards like DDoS attacks…
• Can be mitigated through
proper planning and the
use of Border Gateway
Protocol (BGP) technology
and communities.
– These can tell the Internet
where to route your traffic
and can even help you take
action against inbound
attacks.
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13. Data Archiving
Get your data out of Dodge…
• Making sure your data is available offsite to
help you resume operations
– Traditional Approach: Backup Tapes
– Alternate Approach: Leverage the Cloud
Restoring from Internet takes less time.
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14. Data Replication
Keeping data current…
• Private, long-haul optical links and MPLS
backbone network provides high-
performance, redundant connectivity between
data centers.
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15. Application Failover
Rapid, automatic and seamless…
• Ensuring that user sessions can be
efficiently directed to a secondary site with
minimal interruption.
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16. Application Failover
• e-High Availability
– Customized
failure detection
– Traffic redirection
across two or
more locations
• Global Load Balancers
– Ensure no perceived down time
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20. AIS DR/BC Quick Start Package
Quickly establish remote site…
• 1/3 private rack (14ru) in the AIS Van Buren
(Phoenix) data center
• Redundant (A+B) power circuits with dedicated
power distribution units (PDU)
• Automatic Transfer Switch for single-powered
devices
• 1 Mbps of premium bandwidth with eight IP
addresses
• Initial AIS ProServices consultation session
• Remote hands technical assistance
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23. About American Internet Services (AIS)
• We are enterprise-class data center and connectivity
company with premium footprints in three geographic
locations: Los Angeles, San Diego and Phoenix.
– We provide colocation, managed, and network
services.
– 24x7: Resources are always available when you
need them.
– We are privately held, backed by Seaport
Capital, Viridian Investments, and DuPont Capital
Management.
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24. We are a call or click away…
• www.americanis.net
• 866-971-2656
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25. How we did on Thursday…
"AIS has generators, onsite fuel storage
and fuel supply contracts in place to keep
the facilities operating for an indefinite
period of time." –Tim Caulfield, AIS CEO
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26. How we did on Thursday…
"Kudos to the team at AIS. All of our stuff worked as
advertised and expected." – Kevin
"Very nice communication on this event. Rob and I were
kept informed and we were able to keep our staff and
client up to date. We appreciate the effort." -- Jerry
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Editor's Notes
Not every business needs to invest in top-of-the-line systems for each of the five principles; the level of protection needed will vary depending on the needs of each individual business, but every business needs to have a plan that implements all five to some degree.
White boarded out – this is how it looks.
Don't put all your eggs in one basket.
We're sorry, but all circuits are busy... Do you have a plan for your IP addresses?
Get your data out of Dodge: You need a plan for ensuring that your data is available offsite to help you resume operations. For a faster response, there are a number of offsite data archiving services that leverage the cloud to create secure, online repositories for large amounts of data. They may even allow you to store your data in multiple locations around the globe and include data integrity checking. In the event of a disaster, you can restore your data directly from the Internet to your alternative data center in less time than the traditional method of shipping physical back-ups.
They can't get us all: You need to continuously replicate data between facilities to keep your data as current as possible.
Don't drop the baton.
e-High Availability capabilities, which provide customized failure detection and traffic redirection across two or more physical locations. Each of our global load balancers is located in a separate, fully autonomous data center and is continually checking the health of the customer application to ensure the end-user perceives no downtime and only minimal delays. Our e-High Availability devices direct traffic to the appropriate web servers by using enhanced DNS, directing traffic to the "appropriate" we server.
