Why Do We Need Disaster Recovery?
Machines and technology fail. Natural or man-made disasters occur. Networks go down. And website or application outages caused by any of these situations are going to happen. On the other hand, today’s customers have high expectations that any website they access will be available at all times and they have minimal tolerance for any inconveniences due to system outages.
Instead of hoping for good luck or that disasters will bypass them, most companies meet their business requirement to minimize customer disruptions by deploying disaster recovery or DR options to deliver high levels of uninterrupted uptime. The disaster recovery options for SearchStax Cloud, our Solr-as-a-Service solution, are an insurance policy against the unexpected and provide the highest level of customer service while reducing risk and removing uncertainty while determining the amount of downtime your business will sustain.
Why are RTO and RPO Important in Disaster Recovery?
As noted in an earlier SearchStax blog post The Important Rs for Your Solr Disaster Recovery Plan, there are two key terms with respect to disaster recovery:
- Recovery Time Objective or RTO is the amount of time that your Solr service can be unavailable in case of an emergency
- Recovery Point Objective or RPO defines the amount of data that your business can tolerate losing in case of an emergency.
RPO determines how frequently you need to back up your data and/or synchronize it across your infrastructure. Assuming your RPO is two hours, you would need to make sure you have a backup within the last two hours available for your business.
RTO determines how quickly you can recreate your infrastructure and recover the data from your backup.
Disaster Recovery Options for Solr Deployments
SearchStax offers three disaster recovery options for Solr deployments to meet a range of business requirements:
- Hot Disaster Recovery
- Warm Disaster Recovery
- Cold Disaster Recovery
The differences are based on how quickly it takes to restore your service and how much data loss your business is willing to tolerate in the event of a disaster.
Under all Disaster Recovery options, SearchStax takes on the responsibility of restoring your service to full operation following a disaster event. Disaster recovery efforts will be initiated upon customer request or when the managed Solr service is unavailable for five minutes.
Hot Disaster Recovery for Solr Deployments
For businesses with aggressive RTO and RPO requirements, a duplicate infrastructure that mirrors your primary production environment in real-time may be needed. SearchStax offers a Hot Disaster Recovery option that augments your production deployment and provides the highest level of redundancy and resource capacity during a disaster.
To achieve this level of redundancy, we create a “hot” standby or secondary deployment in a different region than your production deployment. This secondary deployment is a full replica of your primary production environment and is kept in sync with your production system at all times. That means that an interruption in service at the primary site for the production system can be met by a near instantaneous switchover to the standby site.
To ensure that no disaster can knock out the primary and backup systems, we architect the system to have the standby system run in a different cloud-provider region.