Two Data Centers Too Close For Comfort

Using Your Business Continuity Data Center for Disaster Recovery is Like a Tandem Dive

Too often, business continuity planning and disaster recovery planning are treated as the same functions. Unfortunately, they are not. Business continuity planning ?helps organizations insure that applications and processes continue through the myriad of day-to-day disruptions that might occur. These include IT component failures, such as disk-drive failures, a server failure, a dropped network link, or an application bug. Disaster recovery planning helps organizations recover operations after less frequent, but far more devastating events, such as fires, floods, hurricanes, earthquakes, and a variety of man-made disasters. While the data center strategy is only one component of business continuity and disaster recovery planning, it is a key component. ?And while business continuity and disaster recovery planning are different functions, they must often be considered together, because of budget limitations.

There are plenty of advantages to having a business continuity data center in region, a very short distance from the production data center. If the data centers are very close, there will be little impact on transaction latency for the always-important two-phase database commit. ?Failover times from the production data center to the business continuity data center can be very short. Staff that normally work at the primary data center can easily show up for work at the in-region business continuity data center. ?WAN charges between the primary and business continuity data centers will be relatively low.

The ?problem with an in-region business continuity data center is that it can?t replace an out-of-region disaster recovery data center. The two are simply too close for comfort. And few organizations can afford three data centers. Following are a few of the types of disasters that can prevent an in-region business continuity data center from acting as a disaster recovery data center:

Natural disasters

• Earthquakes
• Floods
• Hurricanes
• Tornadoes

Man-made disasters

• Electrical-grid failure
• Telecommunications failure
• Transportation systems failure
• Chemical spills
• Radiation leaks
• War, terrorism, and civil unrest

For these types disasters, it is much more likely that both in-region data centers will be affected and much more challenging to recover applications and data. One of the trade-offs organizations must make is between how quickly they recover and how certain they are that they can recover from the range of disasters that could strike them. We believe that a slight increase in recovery time is well worth the additional assurance that you can actually recover applications after a disaster. Using an in-region business continuity data center as a disaster recovery data center is a little like doing a tandem sky dive. It?s fine, as long as nothing goes wrong.

Source: http://www.axxana.com/blog/index.php/two-data-centers-too-close-for-comfort/

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