Originating Author: David Floyer
In the 2/26/07 Wikibon Storage Research meeting (see Storage ménage à trois for disaster recovery testing we concluded that certain core infrastructure industries and their suppliers need to consider architecting a three-node data center to improve testing and resiliency. We also concluded that this technology would become more widely used over the next five years as these technologies and services become higher volume & lower cost solutions.
We see a number of organization implications for this, so that if and when necessary, organizations can adopt such technologies with the minimum effort. Organizations should ensure that they have robust procedures for ensuring that their BIA (Business Impact Analysis) is kept up to date, and is signed off by senior management. In many organizations this task will be assigned to the CSO (Chief Security Officer). Organizations also need to ensure that there is a robust relationship between the CSO and the CTO (Chief Technical Officer). The CTO needs to take a clear mission to ensure that Business Continuance architectures can accommodate three-node disaster recovery topologies over the long term. There should be a mid-to long term plan for remediating systems and applications that do not comply with architectural standards.
The physical positioning of data centers and/or the location of third-party disaster recovery services is crucial. Once established, these sites are difficult, expensive and time consuming to change.
Action Item: Location decisions should ensure that three-node disaster recovery topologies can be easily set up when necessary. For example, it is better to have two data centers in one city and the “C” site in another rather than in three separate cities.
