Disaster Recovery

In essence, disaster recovery refers to actions taken during a natural or manmade event (fire, flood, electric outage, etc.) to minimize the adverse effects of it.

Solutions often include:

• Secondary power supplies
• Separate carrier connections
• Duplicate network components
• Multipoint architectures
• Geo-redundancy and virtualization

This is an emerging opportunity that enables organizations to virtualize portions of the network infrastructure, particularly components like load balancers and controllers, to reduce their vulnerabilities and improve recovery time objectives (RTOs).

Virtualization supports redundancy by delivering high availability and fault tolerance:

• High availability monitors for failures and can restart on another host automatically.
• Fault tolerance is similar to high availability, however it mirrors the environment instead of starting it on another host. This ensures almost zero downtime, though it does consume more resources.

Geo-redundancy effectively replicates data between disparate sites so that if one is affected by an event like a fire or flood you will be able to switch to another and still access the information you need. Although there are some elements of your network infrastructure like electrical connections that can’t be made geo-redundant, others like load balancers and controllers can through the use of something like a virtualization solution.