Designing Active-Active and Disaster Recovery Data Centers

In the fist section of this webinar we'll try to figure out why we'd want to migrate application workload between data centers, and define a few useful terms like RTO, RPO, MTTR and MTTI.

There are four typical reasons why you'd want to migrate application servers between data centers: migration, disaster recovery or avoidance, and workload load balancing.

A number of factors limit our ability to deploy servers across multiple data centers: latency, bandwidth limitations, and data gravity.

Well-designed active-active applications used "swimlanes" - a concept where multiple copies of an application stack reside in different locations.

Instead of redesigning applications to make them work across multiple data centers, enterprise environments typically try to solve the challenges within the infrastructure, sometimes even moving running servers between data centers. This section describes most obvious drawbacks of that idea.

Time for a wrap-up. We'll discuss the right way of doing things, surviving infrastructure failures, and typical real-life designs.

Networking and virtualization vendors keep proposing crazier and crazier ideas that are supposed to allow you to run active-active data centers without touching the application architecture. Not surprisingly, most of them fail disastrously under the right failure conditions.

If you want to have a highly-available application, there's simply no substitute for good design including global and local load balancing. In his presentation, Ethan Banks described the architecture he used when running multiple data centers for a large credit card payment processor, and lessons learned while operating them.

The blog posts, articles, and books collected in this section might help you get a broader perspective on high-availability application architectures.