[LINK] FLoods taking out banking infrastructure

[Rachel Polanskis]

On 13/01/2011, at 7:53 PM, Marghanita da Cruz <marghanita at ramin.com.au> wrote:

> Brendan wrote:
> <snip>
>> If it is a failure of a secondary nature then so be it - "no electricity" shouldn't cut it as they should have on site generators, but perhaps a problem with connectivity to/from the site sounds more plausible?  A *DR site* which is taken out by the same flood as the primary seems to me a failure in planning. 
> <snip>
> 
> It is more an issue of the scope of a DR Strategy rather 
> than site. The most effective approach is to have multiple 
> operational sites - that way, if one goes down the service 
> is still available but at reduced capacity.

That is why I mentioned geoclustering, which would permit, 
for example, the Brisbane Datacentre to be mirrored to a similar one 
in another centre and, if I understand the technology, distance is not really
a problem so long of course as you have a route there.  I think we might end up
seeing big bundles of NBN fibre being used to support this in future, perhaps....

Multi-tiered apps that can be horizontally scaled are good candidates
for geoclustering.  You could run all the web front ends in any city and have
databases setup for distributed mesg queues between one another, I guess
for all the transaction traffic.  I don't know if banks do it like this now, or if it 
would be unsecure, but it is an option that means downtime is reduced quite
a bit...


rachel

--
rachel polanskis 
<r.polanskis at uws.edu.au> 
<grove at zeta.org.au>
>