Re: Bit OT : diff bet'n business continuity and high availability
Date: Thu, 24 Dec 2009 08:40:37 -0600
Message-ID: <bc04324b0912240640u4bdb885dr49fe0f057294fed1_at_mail.gmail.com>
I agree with Niall. To put both things into more technical terms, I consider business continuity to typically refer to disaster recovery solutions. So, that would make the technical question more about differentiating between high availability and disaster recovery.
The age old example for Oracle DB has often been using clustering (failover or RAC) for high availability and data guard for disaster recovery. I'm not sure that really holds true these days since data guard can get a lot closer to what failover clusters provide with its automatic failover features.
I should also mention that many organizations would make the technical disaster recovery plan for databases just one piece of their business continuity plan. For example, I was at an organization's business continuity site recently where there were a sea of desktop computers and phones lined up on empty desks. No one works there...normally. However, if there's a disaster at their primary site (which is about 50 miles away), then all workers are directed to commute to the business continuity site so that they can keep working. The existence and maintenance of that site is part of their business continuity plan. Of course, the business continuity site also had a data center with systems equivalent to the critical systems in the primary site's data center.
Dan
On Thu, Dec 24, 2009 at 6:48 AM, Niall Litchfield < niall.litchfield_at_gmail.com> wrote:
> I'd handle this using the following rough definitions
>
> Business Continuity is about ensuring that the business itself is able to
> survive unexpected or catastrophic events. It therefore covers the entire
> gamut of business operations (what do you do when you've lost half your
> executive board, how do you cope when your staff can't get into work, how do
> you deal with the loss of manufacturing capability at a major site and so
> on).
>
> High Availability is largely about ensuring that business systems are as
> near as possible "always on" and is therefore mostly a technology question.
>
> HA *can* be a business decision taken by the IT function, BC *never* can
> be
>
> On Thu, Dec 24, 2009 at 10:57 AM, _JP_ <premj_at_rediffmail.com> wrote:
>
>> List,
>>
>> (Sorry for this bit OT discussion. Would stop such posts
>> in future ... if it is not acceptable on this list)
>>
>> I was asked (in an interview sometime back): about the difference
>> bet'n high availability solution and business continuity solution.
>>
>> For me - both sound similar except - BCS is from business
>> perspective and HAS is from technical perspective.
>>
>> Is that right ? How would you guys have handled this question ?
>>
>> Thoughts ?!!
>>
>> ~ jp ~
>>
>> <http://sigads.rediff.com/RealMedia/ads/click_nx.ads/www.rediffmail.com/signatureline.htm_at_Middle?>
>
>
>
>
> --
> Niall Litchfield
> Oracle DBA
> http://www.orawin.info
>
-- http://www.freelists.org/webpage/oracle-lReceived on Thu Dec 24 2009 - 08:40:37 CST