A disaster is a situation in which critical components in your environment become unavailable so that service cannot be resumed in a short period (less than a day as a general rule).
· Example: destruction of hardware by fire.
In case of a disaster, you need to be able to replicate your environment on a new hardware infrastructure.
· A disaster recovery strategy is normally very expensive to implement. The cost depends on the complexity of your environment.
Service level agreements defined
1. Conduct a business impact analysis to understand the impact in your business in case your systems are not available.
2. Specify the technical infrastructure required for a disaster recovery. Determine the cost, including servers, network infrastructure, and so on.
3. Specify the procedures required to be able to implement a disaster recovery. For example, backup tapes must be stored outside the production data center.
4. Identify the requirements for a standby data center.
5. Identify the requirements for standby databases. You can replicate the entire database. This approach is known as hot site backup or standby. If the replication functionality is transparent, it is built into the database service and does not have to be coded in the client applications.
6. Decide on your strategy for disaster recovery.
Consider installing your production environment at a separate data center from your development and quality assurance environments.
Size your development and quality assurance environments to match your production environment and establish procedures for restoring the production environment.
Disaster recovery strategy