Silverstripe Cloud quickly responds and recovers to another location in New Zealand if a major disaster—like an earthquake—takes the primary data centre offline. You can pay for 2 different recovery options depending on how quickly you need your website up and running.
1. Passive disaster recovery
Cost
A small extra monthly fee.
How it works
A copy of your website is continuously mirrored from the primary to the secondary data centre. This reduces potential data loss and increases recovery speed. In the case of a disaster, we will ‘boot up’ virtual machines and make networking changes at the secondary data centre to restore the site.
You can only get passive disaster recovery for your production environment — not for UAT or additional test and UAT environments.
Recovery time
20 hours (Contracted Service Level).
2. Active disaster recovery
Cost
A larger extra monthly fee.
How it works
The environment (the CMS application, files and database) is continuously replicated between the primary data centre and the secondary data centre.
Under normal circumstances, website traffic is served from the primary data centre only. Should a degradation of service occur (primary not responding), the traffic will be switched over to the secondary data centre at the load-balancer level.
Continuous replication means the secondary is able to take over from the primary in a much shorter timespan than passive disaster recovery.
To fulfil the disaster recovery expectation, the secondary must not be used for offloading work from primary, nor can it be taken into consideration in capacity planning. In other words, secondary capacity must equal primary capacity at all times, even under peak load, so that it can take the workload over at short notice.
Using active disaster recovery for your UAT environment
We configure Active DR for both your UAT and production environment. This means that in a disaster your UAT and production environments will have the same server configuration. You’ll be able to:
- accurately test production performance and locate issues
- write and test code that works in the production environment, preventing the chance of an outage
- quickly develop and deploy code.
Recovery time
4 hours (Contracted Service Level).
In some situations where the failure is straightforward the failover will occur automatically within minutes.