When planning Disaster Recovery (DR), it is important for a business to have taken into consideration all of the necessary factors so that in the event of there being issues at the primary site that necessitate the need for services to be served from the DR location, this transfer can be seamless so that visitors don’t notice the switch and there is no downtime caused. Under most circumstances measures will need to be taken to ensure that the backup location has the resources to cope with the demand that a sudden diversion in traffic is going to cause; however, keeping these resources current to a website’s average demand can be hard meaning that often a DR site will never be fully prepared to cope with the demand placed upon it. With the eNlight platform running at your DR site you can be guaranteed full compatibility with your existing systems, as this system isn’t reliant on any particular operating system or platform at the primary site; furthermore, the eNlight platform has been developed with scalability at its core so that you don’t have to be specific with the resources that you require a the DR site – instead you can have a set of basic resources that can be automatically scaled as the demand that they are placed under increases.

Factors to Consider when Designing a Disaster Recovery Solution (DRS)

As part of it’s Business Continuity plans, every business should have a DRS drawn up that will specify how its IT infrastructure needs will still be met in the event of a disaster. As part of the design of a DRS, there are three specific factors that should be taken into consideration so that an amicable plan can be developed that will guarantee that business operations can continue to some level. These three factors are:

Maximum Tolerable Downtime (MTD) – the period of time for which a business can suffer downtime without there being any major impact on cash flows or business operations – the downtime caused should never exceed this figure
Recovery Time Objective (RTO) – this is the period of time in which a business should aim to recover and get its services back online from any disasters that have occurred
Recovery Point Objective (RPO) – this is the level of data loss that a business can cope with – this is based on the backups that a business takes, so for example if they take backups weekly then they can tolerate the loss of up to a weeks worth of data; however, it is highly recommended that real-time backups are taken to ensure that you are able to restore your services to the level and state that they were in prior to the disaster occurring.

Cross Platform Solution

eNlight represents a cross platform DR solution that can be utilized by any organization, regardless of the operating system or platform that they are running at their primary site. This helps eNlight-based DR configurations to represent a cost-effective solution for businesses because replicating the hardware configurations that have been formed at the primary site at a secondary location can be incredibly costly; with everything in the cloud being virtualized, hardware costs are greatly reduced and so operating a DR site has become much more affordable so that businesses of all sizes can ensure that their websites and related services remain online when experiencing issues.

Data Replication

With any DR configuration, the data between the primary site and the DR site needs to be kept in constant synchronization so that when fallover takes place in the event of failure, visitors and clients aren’t able to notice any difference to the service that they are using or receiving because all of the data that would have been presented to them when accessing the application at the primary site will still be available at the DR site. If data isn’t replicated properly or constantly then this could introduce issues with there being a mismatch in data that can be accessed at either location, which could lead to data loss in some situations.

Scalability of eNlight Cloud

When a fallover takes place from your primary site to the eNlight environment, all the traffic currently routed to your primary site is going to be automatically directed to the eNlight DR site; the resources at the DR site will need to be at least equal to those of the primary site to guarantee that the DR site remains stable. As this level of resource demand can be hard to calculate, the eNlight platform remedies this by introducing an auto-scaling feature that will provide your eNlight VMs with the resources that they require at that point in time automatically so that they will remain stable whatever the load placed on them may be. The eNlight cloud is based around a large resource pool so that even the most demanding of customers can utilize this service as part of their DR configuration. You will of course be billed for the resources that you are automatically assigned, but you can place a cap on the amount of resources allocated in this way and the amount that you wish to spend in this manner.

For more information about eNlight Cloud Hosting, see the ESDS eNlight Cloud website.