Developing a successful disaster recovery solution can be complicated. In this presentation, GoGrid Solutions Architects explore the concepts of redundancy and availability plus three common disaster recovery methodologies. To learn more about GoGrid’s cloud infrastructure solutions, please visit http://www.gogrid.com.

1. Disaster Recovery in the Cloud
Promoting Server, Cloud Storage,
and Multi-POP Use with Disaster
Recovery
David Michael, Jeff Sweet, & Scott Pankonin
GoGrid Solutions Architects

2. Agenda
 Redundancy & Availability
 Disaster Recovery – Definitions & Theory
 Stand-by Data Center Options – Cold & Warm
 Value Proposition
 “Gotchas”
 Geographic Redundancy – Hot! (Active/Active DCs)
 Value Proposition
 “Gotchas”
 Strategies to Promote Use
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3. Redundancy & Availability
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4. Redundancy & Availability
 Redundancy & Availability = Uptime
 Load Balancing
 Scaling application to demand/load
 Fault-tolerance – immune to single node failure
(n+1)
 Backups to Cloud Storage
 Speedy recovery for failed application-resources
 Recovery plan + assets (backups, GSIs) = faster
recovery time
 Other Redundancy Options
 Stand-by servers
 Replicated database server Warm-standby
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5. Availability & Redundancy
 Load-balanced applications have built-in fault tolerance and can scale up and
down with load/demand
 The proverbial 3:00 am call – “Your server/website is down.”
 Having current backups and GSIs in place on Cloud Storage
 Recovery assets in place + good plan = faster recovery times
 If your uptime requirements are high, deploying stand-by servers is the best
option
 Already have the correct configuration and current data
 Simple application data source name change to make active
 Could be automatic
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6. Disaster Recovery
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7. Disaster Recovery
(and how DR is an extension of Redundancy & Availability)
 Redundancy & availability is uptime – The ability of that application to resist
failure of one of its constituent parts, or to recover quickly from it, and the
ability of an application to provide ready and consistent response/
performance under any type of application demand.
 Disaster recovery moves redundancy to the data center level. There are
different stand-by environment strategies based on tradeoffs between
cost, complexity, and speed of recovery – Cold, Warm & Hot
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8. Disaster Recovery: Cold Standby
 Small server in alternate data center – connection to Cloud Storage
 Backups shipped over CloudLink
 GSIs & database restore + DNS change to recover environment
West East
DB Backups
 Value Proposition
 Entry-level – least expensive geo-redundant strategy
 “Gotchas”
 Data loss (to last backup)
 Recovery time – hours to 1-2 days (depending on DNS propagation)
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9. Disaster Recovery: Warm Standby
 Stand-by database server in alternate data center with data synchronization
 Databases synchronized over CloudLink (mirroring, log-shipping, replication)
 GSIs + DNS change (or failover) to recover environment
West East
Live Data
 Value Proposition
 Still fairly entry-level – a less expensive geo-redundant strategy
 Minimal data loss without greatly increased complexity
 “Gotchas”
 Recovery time – hours to 1-2 days (depending on DNS propagation)
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10. Full Geographic Redundancy
 Duplicate environment running in second data center with data synchronization
 Databases synchronized over CloudLink (mirroring, log-shipping, replication)
 DNS load balancing distributes users to nearest available data center
West East
Live Data
 Value Proposition
 Maximum redundancy & availability
 “Gotchas”
 Highly engineered solution
 Expensive – Doubling environment adds 150%-200% to server costs
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11. Summary
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12. Disaster Recovery Strategies
 Cold & Warm Stand-by
 Low barrier to entry, and recovery can be fairly quick
 With third-party DNS failover – simple “Under Maintenance” messaging could be
almost immediate
 CloudLink, Cloud Storage, additional servers
 Full Geo-Redundancy
 Complex and expensive, BUT zero downtime and highest availability
 Requires a third-party DNS load-balancing solution to tie it together
 Double-up on infrastructure spend
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13. Questions to Ask
 How are you backing up your data now?
 Backups to Cloud Storage + GSI server templates are critical for recovery
 Do you have a plan to recover from server failure?
 Recovery assets + plan in place = speedy recovery
 Have you thought about doing offsite backups to another of our data centers?
 Offsite backups are better than local
 CloudLink to a secondary data center provides entry-level geographic redundancy
economically
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14. More Resources
 GoGrid Solutions – High Availability
 GoGrid Article – “You Don’t Need a Superstorm: Disaster Recovery Basics”
 Corporate Site – www.GoGrid.com
 Corporate Blog – Blog.GoGrid.com
 Twitter – @GoGrid
 Facebook – www.facebook.com/GoGrid
 LinkedIn – www.linkedin.com/company/GoGrid
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