No, this isn’t a pitch for a new blues song, nor a segue to bemoan the state of things, unless you are thinking about every application that may be vulnerable. Face it, if they are all in one data center, you know a lot is riding on the application and you know there is nothing to fail over to in the case of an issue. While you grumble, you know there was not enough original funding to pay for a fully duplicated failover environment. So, do you just listen to old blues songs and wait for the inevitable?
The short answer is “no,” as there are approaches to tackling this issue. The first thing to do is get everyone to agree on which applications are the most critical. Then, possibly the harder part, getting everyone to agree on the top three to five applications that are critical to run in a disaster recovery (D/R) scenario. Even if those applications run at a cloud vendor, emphasize to the business teams that hardware does indeed fail — even in the cloud.
For a simplistic scenario, assume that application ABC is one of the most critical applications, runs 24×7, and resides in only one data center. If some of the infrastructure fails, the application will not be available. Even “high availability” applications are vulnerable. Ugh!
If you have some funding, but not enough to duplicate all the components from the production environment, consider a scaled-down version for D/R. Imagine our fictitious ABC application’s daily usage requires 40 virtual machines (VMs) for the application, and 12 VMs for the web site. If you scale that down to say 10 VMs for the application, and 3 VMs for the web site, the cost will certainly be less than duplicating the entire production environment. The big plus is that the application will still be available when the production system isn’t. Will it run as fast? No, but it will be available, and you may be able to provide informational messages to users to let them know they may experience some slow responses. Slow, but still available. There are two wins here:
- Business teams still have a functioning application.
- IT teams can focus on addressing the root cause of the problem and getting it corrected on the first effort.
While the scenario described depicts an on-premises environment setting, it also applies to a cloud environment. In short, a scaled-down D/R site that “runs” is better that not running at all. IT architects will still need to address any underlying databases and possible restrictions of network traffic, so the actual implementation isn’t that simple, but this approach should be less costly. Some IT teams may have thought of this approach, although some business teams may not. Perhaps this suggestion can start that dialogue. This should reduce the stress across the organization and hopefully keep you from singing the blues (unless you just like that genre)!
Dan Kempton is the Sr. IT Advisor at North Carolina Department of Information Technology. An accomplished IT executive with over 35 years of experience, Dan has worked nearly equally in the private sector, including startups and mid-to-large scale companies, and the public sector. His Bachelor’s and Master’s degrees in Computer Science fuel his curiosity about adopting and incorporating technology to reach business goals. His experience spans various technical areas including system architecture and applications. He has served on multiple technology advisory boards, ANSI committees, and he is currently an Adjunct Professor at the Industrial & Systems Engineering school at NC State University. He reports directly to the CIO for North Carolina, providing technical insight and guidance on how emerging technologies could address the state’s challenges.
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