Building Foundations for Disaster Recovery
In the wake of recent events on the East Coast of the United States, disaster recovery (DR) planning has reared its head again. Of course, it’s a bad time to think about disaster recovery right after an event with such a large impact. However, it’s even worse to never think about it.
Prior to working at Puppet Labs, I spent a lot of time on disaster recovery. For nearly two years, I led a team designing multi-site replication, creating reference architectures for availability and recovery, and selling our business partners on disaster recovery investments. This was for one of the top performing business units at a Fortune 100 company with seven and eight figure budgets for DR.
Disaster recovery is a huge proposition. It’s costly, time consuming, difficult to test correctly and often the first thing cut when doing budget reviews. DR planning is also never complete. You evolve. You change. Your plans need to as well.
The starting points for DR planning can be difficult to find. Infrastructure engineers often jump to technical solutions. Before you figure out the newest wizbang in storage replication technologies and failover, take a step back.