Overview of Business Continuity Clustering113novdocx (en) 7 January 20101Overview of Business ContinuityClusteringAs corporations become more international, fueled in part by the reach of the Internet, therequirement for service availability has increased. Novell® Business Continuity Clustering (BCC)offers corporations the ability to maintain mission-critical (24x7x365) data and application servicesto their users while still being able to perform maintenance and upgrades on their systems.In the past few years, natural disasters (ice storms, earthquakes, hurricanes, tornadoes, and fires)have caused unplanned outages of entire data centers. In addition, U.S. federal agencies haverealized the disastrous effects that terrorist attacks could have on the U.S. economy whencorporations lose their data and the ability to perform critical business practices. This has resulted ininitial recommendations for corporations to build mirrored or replicated data centers that aregeographically separated by 300 kilometers (km) or more. (The minimum acceptable distance is 200km.)Many companies have built and deployed geographically mirrored data centers. The problem is thatsetting up and maintaining the multiple centers is a manual process that takes a great deal ofplanning and synchronizing. Even configuration changes must be carefully planned and replicated.One mistake and the redundant site is no longer able to effectively take over in the event of adisaster.This section identifies the implications for disaster recovery, provides an overview of some of thenetwork implementations today that attempt to address disaster recovery, and describes howBusiness Continuity Clustering can improve your disaster recovery solution by providingspecialized software that automates cluster configuration, maintenance, and synchronization acrosstwo to four geographically separate sites. Section 1.1, “Disaster Recovery Implications,” on page 13 Section 1.2, “Disaster Recovery Implementations,” on page 14 Section 1.3, “Business Continuity Clustering,” on page 20 Section 1.4, “BCC Deployment Scenarios,” on page 21 Section 1.5, “Key Concepts,” on page 241.1 Disaster Recovery ImplicationsThe implications of disaster recovery are directly tied to your data. Is your data mission critical? Inmany instances, critical systems and data drive the business. If these services stop, the businessstops. When calculating the cost of downtime, some things to consider are File transfers and file storage E-mail, calendaring, and collaboration Web hosting Critical databases Productivity Reputation
