IANAS (I'm not a sysadmin), but I have been thinking about this a bit lately. (Warning: what follows is a lengthy collection of semi-coherent musings that in no way answer the question.)
Here are some random thoughts: - You need to be strict with how you want to approach it, and how much you are willing to spend, because it is a little like chasing rainbows with true DR, and you can spend a mint. - Depends a lot on whether you want to manage it yourself or let someone else handle the complexity. Considering that it is something that is very unlikely to be invoked, I would delegate it to the experts, but this obviously costs more. Working at one of the big telcos a few years ago, we handled the DR plans in house, and while I wasn't across the details, the documents flying around were hefty, and I don't think anyone had considered how large a project it was. - If you are going to the full extent of DR, then you need to have covered off all the previous levels of emergency as well. For instance, prior to expending time and energy on the case of the building burning down, have you already made plans for the more likely scenario that a box dies? -- maybe you've got several boxes in the same premises with automatic IP-switching and a database setup that can have you replaying deltas seconds after a meltdown. In any case, tick that box first. A couple of weeks ago I went on a tour of Macquarie Hosting (http://www.macquarietelecom.com/hosting/) who are tier 1 level hosts, and have an excellent hosting facility down in Haymarket, with all sorts of physical security, a good call center and a team of round the clock engineers. We chatted about DR, and some of the things that came up were: - distance to the DR center. Are two different buildings okay? Suburbs? Cities? - are you dealing with a private network, or a public app? - are your non-automated processes up to scratch for handling downtime? The last piece of advice our guy on the inside gave was: whatever the plans, you need accept that there's going to be a lot of areas that you will have no control over, and the best you can do is minimise their impact. For our projects, we'd only be looking into a serious DR plan if the client insisted on it, and had the budget to make it happen. Cheers, Dave On Tue, Jan 27, 2009 at 4:34 PM, Mike Bailey <[email protected]> wrote: > I'm interested in hearing from people who have good Disaster Recovery > setups. > > If there was a fire at the datacentre and all the servers/routers your > application depends on were destroyed, how long before your applications > would be fully functional again? > > - Mike > > > > --~--~---------~--~----~------------~-------~--~----~ You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "Ruby or Rails Oceania" group. To post to this group, send email to [email protected] To unsubscribe from this group, send email to [email protected] For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/rails-oceania?hl=en -~----------~----~----~----~------~----~------~--~---
