Overview; Disaster Recovery Implications; Disaster Recovery Implementations - Novell BUSINESS CONTINUITY CLUSTERING FOR NETWARE 1.1 - ADMINISTRATION Manual

Overview

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As corporations become more international, fueled in part by the reach of the World Wide Web, the
requirement for service availability has increased. Novell
the ability to maintain 24x7x365 data and application services to their users while still being able to
perform maintenance and upgrades on their systems.
In the past few years, natural disasters (ice storms, earthquakes, hurricanes, tornadoes, and fires)
have caused unplanned outages of entire data centers. In addition, US federal agencies have realized
the disastrous effects that terrorist attacks could have on the US economy when corporations lose
their data and the ability to perform critical business practices. This has resulted in initial
recommendations for corporations to build mirrored or replicated data centers that are
geographically separated by 300 km or more (The minimum acceptable distance being 200 km).
Many companies have built and deployed geographically mirrored data centers. The problem is that
setting up and maintaining the two or more centers is a very manual process that takes a great deal of
planning and synchronizing. Even configuration changes have to be carefully planned and
replicated. One mistake and the redundant site is no longer able to effectively take over in the event
of a disaster.

1.1 Disaster Recovery Implications

The implications of disaster recovery are directly tied to your data. Is your data mission critical? In
many instances, critical systems and data drive the business. If these services stop, the business
stops. When calculating the cost of downtime, some things to consider are
File transfers and file storage
E-mail, calendaring and collaboration
Web hosting
Critical databases
Productivity
Reputation
Continuous availability of critical business systems is no longer a luxury, it is a competitive business
requirement.The Gartner Group estimates that 40% of enterprises that experience a disaster will go
out of business in five years and only 15% of enterprises have a full-fledged business continuity plan
that goes beyond core technology and infrastructure.

1.2 Disaster Recovery Implementations

There are two main Novell Cluster Services implementations that you can use to achieve your
desired level of disaster recovery. These include a stretch cluster and a cluster of clusters. The
Novell Business Continuity Cluster product automates some of the configuration and processes used
in a cluster of clusters.
Section 1.2.1, "Stretch Clusters vs. Cluster of Clusters," on page 12
Section 1.2.2, "Novell Business Continuity Clusters," on page 15
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Cluster Services™ offers corporations
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