Planning for Business Continuity
High availability is only part of the solution; it's one component in the bigger picture of business continuity. Business continuity is about ensuring that the business can continue operating in the face of a significant event. High availability deals with business continuity from a fairly narrow perspective: ensuring that the business can continue operating in the event of a physical server failure, an OS or application failure, or a network component failure. There are many types of failures that you must account for and protect against; we'll discuss the following two primary types here:
- Protecting against the loss of data due to equipment failure, software malfunction, or simple user error (such as deleting something by mistake, which most of us have done at one time or another)
- Planning for disaster recovery in the event your entire datacenter is rendered unusable or unavailable
Most organizations have a policy or a set of policies that...
