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Disaster recovery implementation and planning shares many concerns with high availability but present a few unique issues:

Types of Disasters

Any location is prone to multiple natural disasters such as tornadoes, hurricanes and earthquakes. Acts of terrorism such as those that occurred in New York on 9/11 wiped out many datacenters and businesses. Sabotage by employees or others can result in hardware and data losses. Fire is a serious risk in any location and especially datacenters

Potential Losses and Disruptions

Losses can range from lost data, hardware, and networks to personnel losses or inaccessibility.

Regular Drills

A disaster recovery plan is useless unless it is thoroughly tested on a regular basis. Simulation drills should encompass every type of potential loss.

Acceptable Losses

The amount of potential data loss must be balanced with cost and performance implications. For example, even real-time database replication can result in lost transactions, however few. A daily backup only plan must account for potential loss of a days worth of data. However, a real-time transaction coordination across multiple global locations may not meet performance requirement objectives. All these factors must be carefully considered and accounted for in system and software architecture as well as a disaster recovery plan.

Typical Disaster Recovery Implementation Lifecycle

Analysis

• Identify mission critical components
• Define acceptable levels of loss and downtime
• Review potential disaster scenarios
• Document the results

Design and Planning

• Design a failover solution
• Take into account each mission critical component
• Ensure requirements are met for acceptable loss and downtime parameters defined during the analysis stage

Implementation

• Acquire necessary hardware and software
• Define and acquire necessary local and remote co-location requirements
• Integrate and configure backup and failover systems

Testing

• Simulate as much as possible disaster scenarios identified during the analysis stage
• Document testing and simulation results
• Iterate and modify design parameters and configuration if necessary
• Create disaster recovery procedures handbook