High Availability Consulting

Overview

A disaster can be a sudden, unplanned catastrophic event that renders the organizations ability to perform mission-critical and critical processes, including the ability to do normal production processing of systems that support critical business processes. A disaster could be the result of significant damage to a portion of the operations, a total loss of a facility, or the inability to access that facility.

Our Approach

Our approach towards High Availability solution can be briefly categorized into following phases -

1. Analysis - The Analysis phase in a H.A. Solution consists of the following;

• Infrastructure Review - A detailed study of entire deployed infrastructure deployed which would facilitate as a baseline for the desired objectives.
• Identify Applications - Applications are classified as mission-critical, critical, essential, or noncritical. As is often the case, a business process will depend on multiple applications that support the business process.
• Identify System Recovery time (SRT) - To Determine SRT the focus would be on Identifying business process, Determine RTO and RPO requirements and Determine the recovery time for host systems and applications.
• Identify Data Currency for Applications - Computing center operations to ensure that applications and data can be copied offsite from the production-computing center to recovery-computing center.

2. Solution design - The goal of the solution design phase is to identify the most cost effective H.A. solution that meets two main requirements from the impact analysis stage;

• The minimum application and application data requirements
• The time frame in which the minimum application and application data must be available

3. Implementation - The implementation phase, quite simply, is the execution of the design elements identified in the solution design phase. Work package testing may take place during the implementation of the solution, however; work package testing does not take the place of organizational testing.

4. Testing and organization acceptance - Testing is to achieve organizational acceptance so that the solution satisfies the organization's recovery requirements. Testing includes;

• Crisis command team call-out testing
• Technical swing test from primary to secondary work locations
• Technical swing test from secondary to primary work locations
• Application test
• Business process test