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Re: Help! Oracle server clustering

From: Dusan Bolek <pagesflames_at_usa.net>
Date: 1 Jul 2002 02:38:04 -0700
Message-ID: <1e8276d6.0207010138.4bf19aea@posting.google.com>


news:<afi3ua01e0q_at_drn.newsguy.com>...

Sean's and Pete's responses were nearly similar in reasoning, so I will response only to second one, but also with consideration of first one. Main reasoning was that you need an intercontinental clustering to achieve full disaster recovery (DR). I think that this is not necessarily true and tell you the reasons.

In the beginning of DR planning we should thing about which catastrophe can strike our site. Is hard to imagine any kind of disaster which would destroy two datacenter with five kilometer distance between them. Sean talked about WTC, even tragedy like that (which was one of the biggest non-war destruction in urban areas in last century) wouldn't destroy datacenter even a mile from crash site. I can't imagine any disaster which can destroy these two datacenters with exception of nuclear war against that very city.

Is sensible to protect your datacenters against nuclear war? I think not. Local companies should take no care about nuclear war, because even with DR plan, they're out of business after first strike. Global players usually do not have a single datacenter in one place on planet. There are usually for example one in USA, one for Europe etc. There is no need for DR of local datacenters, because after nuclear strike these markets are also out of business. If global company has only one datacenter, then this datacenter is situated near or in global HQ. After destroying a global HQ, recovery of company as a global player is nearly impossible even with data guarded datacenter. Local data are on local branches and global business is gone.

Another point which is not usually mentioned if we're talking about clustering environment is that employees are not always "clustered". Majority of DR plans are presuming that datacenter will be destroyed, but people will be recovered. Stand-by data centers are very often just data centers with few B-grade people to maintain them. However key personel is situated on just one place. If there will be a major catastrophe, company will has a terrible problems recovering business after losing of key staff. How can IT personnel can bring stand-by to life while losing all people who know how to operate them? How can company resume business while top executives are burried under debris?

My conclusion is that all DR scenarios are just dealing with a local disasters and not with really major ones. After all, we're just running our unimportant business and not army which must operate even after 60% losses. Not mentioning that (after fall of Wehrmacht and Japanese army) I'm not sure that even any civilized army would still operate after 60% losses.

We're thinking about businesses as center of our life, but after disaster our business is last thing to think about. After WTC some of even global businesses stopped, stock exchange was closed for a week. Just from technical point of view, even NYC can resume with disaster recovery scenarious nearly full functionality in few hours. Stock exchange can continue without even short downtime. But because of politic concerns and because of psychology, everything was much more involved than just from physical damage.

We're just people after all, and I'm pretty sure that we can take much less than two datacenters with five kilometers distance between them.

--
_________________________________________

Dusan Bolek, Ing.
Oracle team leader

Note: pagesflames_at_usa.net has been cancelled due to changes (maybe we
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Received on Mon Jul 01 2002 - 04:38:04 CDT

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