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Déjà Vu is a fully managed, High Availability Business Continuity (HA/BC) system provided by IP Network Technologies under three year contracts. Déjà Vu provides full HA/BC functionality to clients with mission critical networks having the following general network characteristics:
Client’s critical data resides on 3 clusters of 2 servers each, including primary / secondary file servers, a pair of clustered MS SQL2000 database servers, and a pair of DMZ servers that run IIS 5.0 and Exchange 2003 for internet-facing services. Also, the file servers act as their primary and secondary Active Directory controllers. These servers are connected to a 3TB SAN via 2Gbit fiber channel and use an ADIC tape library for local archival and backup.
Déjà Vu fulfills the following client requirements for an HA/BC solution:
The client requires that the data on these servers must be replicated (or “vaulted”) off-site so that in a major system failure or loss of their data center, the client could restore this data as quickly as possible via hardware delivery or media delivery. The total storage usage is 2TB or less, with approx. 5GB per day of data changing daily. Availability of this data must be continuous on fail over servers and recovery of this data must be complete in less than 24 hours -- including the integration and restoration of data to the client’s servers.
Additionally, the client’s Active Directory catalog information must be active at the remote data center for the fail-over servers and for redundancy should they lose their primary and secondary controllers.
The data on this cluster of SQL servers is mission critical to the client’s applications and must be replicated in near real time and made available continuously off-site. The total storage usage of these databases is up to 4GB, with approximately 500Mb of data changing daily.
The client’s intranet web sites and their Exchange environment is critical to the client’s business and must be replicated for instant fail-over or active/active redundancy off-site for continuous availability. Their IIS components serve up to 6 different web sites that are integrated with their MS SQL servers. The size of all website content combined is up to 4GB, and changes infrequently. The Exchange 2003 environment supports 200 or less users and has a message store of up to 50GB, which changes at the rate of approximately 1GB per day.
The client’s network supports 200 or less users through primarily VPN connections using MS RRAS/PPTP. Remote offices and remote workers access the client’s network through these serves via a pair of Cisco Pix 525 Firewalls. A similar or exact solution for remote access would need to be implemented at the fail-over HA/BC site to facilitate emergency access. Additionally, the client wants to multi-home their DNS infrastructure redundantly with the HA/BC provider to ensure constant name resolution should the client’s ISP go off-line in a disaster.
Due to the extremely confidential nature of the client’s data, including data that is subject to Sarbane-Oxley regulations and client financial information, the client’s data must be stored in an encrypted format. Additionally, this data must be encrypted during transmission to the HA/BC provider’s remote data center.
Once an emergency or disaster has been resolved but the client’s systems are still functioning on the fail-over systems in the HA/BC provider’s remote data center, the process to fail-back the client’s systems to its own data center must result in near zero downtime.
During a given emergency, the client’s IT staff may be unavailable or inaccessible. The client must be able to rely on the HA/BC provider’s staff to perform the entire fail-over process so that the client’s remote offices and workers can perform work from their VPN connections. These components must be fully managed and monitored from the HA/BC provider’s Network Operations Center (NOC) on a real-time 24X7X365 basis, assuring that any issue will be immediately caught by the client’s monitoring systems so they may be addressed by their own staff.
HA/BC system testing shall be performed monthly.
The client requires HA/BC system fully tested and operational within 30 days of contract signing.
The foregoing are illustrative specifications of a hypothetical client. It is important to note that the Déjà Vu system is inherently so flexible that it will accommodate a wide range of performance and compatibility requirements without affecting the cost to the client.
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