Data Center Disaster Recovery and High Availability
Chris Gabriel · 2014
This chapter aims to give a sense of the two key design, planning, and process approaches to maintaining the required level of service from the data center and the enterprise architectures residing within it: Disaster Recovery (DR) and High Availability (HA). DR is the discipline of planning for something to go wrong, for downtime of varying length to happen, and a process to initiate recovery in an orderly and timely fashion. HA is proactively designing systems to mitigate a system failure, to minimize downtime to a negligible amount, and to ensure and assume no data loss. The investment in any DR and HA strategy will be primarily driven by business and not technology imperatives. For many organizations, the inherent benefits of virtual technologies bring a clearer and less complex approach to the issue of DR and HA.