In the 2/26/07 Wikibon Storage Research meeting (see Storage menage a trois for disaster recovery testing) we concluded that certain core infrastructure industries need to consider architecting a three-node data center to improve testing and resiliancy.
Less regulated industries should monitor the progress of these leaders to understand:
- The maturity of technologies used
- The processes used to support high quality three-node solutions
- The practices put in place to test and demonstrate the viability of these systems to corporate boards
There are two additonal considerations:
- Line of business buy-in and key metrics must be analyzed before system architectures can be completed-- IT departments should not go it alone.
- Users should begin to require third data center roadmaps be included in vendor RFP's so they can assess supplier direction and viability in this critical area.
Action Item: The business impact analysis (BIA) should carefully assess lag times for the C site and understand the relationship between these lag times and recovery. The longer the lag times the greater the amount of data that will need to be restored and the more manual intervention required.
Footnotes: == What are the actual regulations? ==
I'm sure it's dependent on industry, but what are the specific regulations and guidelines for distance between data centers. Also, it seems that this is a difficult thing to justify to corporate management-- what's the best way to explain the advantages? Belmontl