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The design of the Disaster Tolerant Cluster Services solution was a result of experience that showed repeatedly that a ‘disaster tolerant’ solution constructed simply of two computer centres with ‘shadowed’ or ‘vaulted’ data rarely delivered full disaster tolerance to the business. Experience also revealed that true ‘disaster tolerant’ solutions could not be implemented in isolation, but required a partnership approach between the delivery organisation and the client. In particular, knowledge transfer between the implementers of the solution and the operations team was shown to be critical. The biggest challenge is that whilst building a split-site solution may remove the obvious elements of risk to the business and its applications, the increased component count and configuration changes demanded to achieve it adds complexity. This in itself creates new potential failure scenarios which must be mitigated in order for the solution to achieve its true potential. Put simply, in order to achieve the true business benefits of a Disaster Tolerant environment then you must manage out all of the risks by deploying tools and best practice operating processes into the enviroment. Our approach to Disaster Tolerance evolved over many years by analysing the learnings from real experiences and difficulties that have been faced by operations staff around the world in these kinds of environments. The input from was used to develop benchmark procedures and helped to identify the kinds of tools required to support them. The DTCS solution that exists today is the realisation of this - incorporating lessons learned from a wealth of experience and selecting best in class tools that have been integrated and customised specifically to support the complexity of split-site environments. |
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