| Disaster Recovery & High Availability for AGRESSO |
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Protecting your data and ensuring maximum system availability can be broken down into two distinct areas:-
High Availability
Disaster Recovery Possibly the more acute consideration for most AGRESSO customers. How much data would you lose if a server suffered hardware or software failure?
Losing a server Take the following scenario. At three o clock in the afternoon on any given day, you suffer a problem on one of the live servers which makes it inoperable. Two questions immediately spring to mind.
The answers to these two questions depend on which server is offline. For most AGRESSO users the answer to these two questions typically may be.
Loss of Database Server
The typical setup of the AGRESSO database server, is that a full backup of the database is performed each night to the local disk. This is then backed up to tape. Assuming that the tape backup worked ok last night, the data loss would be everything that has been carried out on the system in the current working day.
For sites using Oracle it may not be as bad as for MS SQL Server users. Oracle should be archiving the used redo logs. Depending on the location of where the archived redo logs are being copied to; and the nature of the disaster you may not lose all of the current days work.
In a situation of losing the AGRESSO database server, the backup situation would follow:-
Loss of Business Server
The immediate impact of losing the Business Server is that no one will be able to log into the AGRESSO back office client. The system is built so that the Business Server hosts the AGRESSO central client and users run the program centrally. Exceptions to this may be for customers using Citrix (but not always the case) or who have built in some redundancy to their environment.
The next question is, apart from the AGRESSO Web interface how long will the AGRESSO system be unavailable? Will this be minutes, hours or days?
If the server requires replacing is there a replacement readily available, or will the hardware vendor have to replace the server? If so how long will this take and how soon can Windows be installed, configured and patched?
This is fairly standard disaster recovery policy and should be accurately estimated by the I.T. department. Depending on the I.T. department and support contract with the hardware vendor, it should typically be hours rather than days.
Installing, configuring and patching AGRESSO on the Business Server may be above the knowledge of a large percentage of sites. It is unreasonable to expect someone who may have had one day’s formal training on the AGRESSO system, to install, configure, patch, set up the central client, install the UK Products and setup the correct shared folders and printers.
In an ideal scenario it may be possible to restore the relevant data from tape backup. Has this been tried? Would you know how long the process would take and what length of time the system would be offline?
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