Elastic DR: a solution architecture that aims to optimally balance cost and recovery time via three core principles that are germane the cloud world: On-Demand: The disaster recovery cloud can be provisioned on any availability zone, region, or public/private cloud through Cloudify's cloud-agnostic bootstrapping mechanism. Elastic: The ability to automatically provision resources in the recovery cloud in case of disaster while eliminating the need for idle resources in normal scenarios, thereby fully profiting from the pay-per-use pricing model of clouds. Flexible RTO/RPO: The architecture can be easily extended from a warm DR to a hot DR pattern through enabling/disabling application recipes. This allows us to exploit economies of scale that the cloud provides by matching the number of recipes/tiers to provision (in the recovery cloud) against the recovery time/point objective for our disaster recovery strategy

1. Cloudifying High Availability
The Case for Elastic Disaster Recovery
Ali Hodroj
Senior Solutions Architect

2.  RTO (Recovery Time Objective)
 RPO (Recovery Point Objective)
 Cost
DISASTER RECOVERY, THE CONTEXT
Disaster Recovery Key Drivers
 Accomplishing high levels of redundancy is
expensive
 The hard cold reality for most businesses:
 The cost of losing 24 hours of data is less than
the cost of maintaining another active data
center.
 Determining an appropriate RPO and RTO is
ultimately a financial calculation:
 …at what point does the cost of data loss and
downtime exceed the cost of a backup strategy
that will prevent that level of data loss and
downtime?
Disaster Recovery Constraints
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3. COST OF AN RTO = 1 HOUR
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Industry Cost/Hour
Finance (Brokerage Operations) $ 5.15 Million
Finance (Credit Card Authorizations) $ 3.10 Million
Telecom $ 2.00 Million
Manufacturing $ 1.60 Million
Online Retail $ 613,000
Communications (ISP) $ 90,000
Media (Ticket Sales) $ 90,000
Transportation $ 89,000
Transportation (Packaging and Shipping) $ 28,000
 Average cost per
hour of downtime
by industry
 Source: “The Meta
Group &
Contingency
Planning
Research”

4. COST OF TESTING DR PROCEDURES
In cloud computing, there’s even a third Time
Objective metric
TTO – Testing Time Objective: The Time required to
test recovery plans to ensure a successful failover in
case of disaster
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5.  Deployable on any cloud any time
 Public, Private, Bare-metal
 Multi-zone, Multi-region out of the box
 Fail over and provision applications
 Automatically (polling master cloud)
 Ad-hoc: Shell command, REST API
 TTO
 Easily provision a test environment for
failover on a micro cloud (laptop)
 Test failure frequently, and test often
ensuring highest resiliency (similar to
Netflix)
WHAT IS ELASTIC ON-DEMAND DISASTER RECOVERY?
On-Demand
 RTO / RPO
 Easily configurable recipes to
increase/decrease RTO and RPO
 Cost
 Pay only for failures without
compromising RTO/RPO
 Leverage cloud economics (any cloud)
Elastic
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6. High Availability
6

7. 7
CLOUD HIGH AVAILABILITY: MATURITY MODEL
Single server instance,
same data center
Same geographical
region
Same operational
procedures, provider
Single Points of
Failures
Copyright 2013 Gigaspaces. All Rights Reserved

8. 8
CLOUD HIGH AVAILABILITY: THE REALITY
Consistent deployment
Cross zone configuration
Machine images, security groups, keys
Different API, zone/region hierarchies
Accidental Complexity: The higher we
move in the HA scale, the less manageable
the deployments become
Copyright 2013 Gigaspaces. All Rights Reserved

9. 9
CLOUD HIGH AVAILABILITY: THROUGH CLOUDIFY
Across clouds
(AWS, Rackspace, Azure…etc)
Across AWS regions
Across AWS zones
1 application
+ overrides
Several cloud
drivers
1 application
+ overrides
1 cloud driver
1 application +
overrides
1 cloud driver
Availability
Same
application and
service recipe
Single recipe, deployable on-demand on any
data center, zone, region, or cloud
Copyright 2013 Gigaspaces. All Rights Reserved

10. 10
ON-DEMAND, ON ANY CLOUD
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11. Disaster Recovery
11

12. ELASTIC ON-DEMAND DISASTER RECOVERY
12
 Problem
 Can we eliminate the
RTO vs. Cost trade-off
in the cloud?
 Solution (Elastic DR)
 A hybrid between Hot
and Warm DR
 Switch to Active site
in matter of seconds
through cloud-
agnostic lifecycle
automation recipes
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13. 13
ELASTIC ON-DEMAND DISASTER RECOVERY: CONTEXT
Cold/Warm
Disaster
Recovery
Hot
Disaster
Recovery
High RTO
Low Cost
Low RTO
High Cost
Elastic DR
Recovery time objective (RTO)—The duration of time
and the service level to which a business process must
be restored after a disaster (or disruption) to avoid
unacceptable consequences associated with a break in
business continuity.
Applying the cloud principle of
Elasticity to Disaster Recovery
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14. 14
ELASTICITY VS CRITICALITY CONTINUUM
Cold/Warm
Disaster
Recovery
Hot
Disaster
Recovery
High RTO
Low Cost
Low RTO
High Cost
Elastic DR
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Operationally
Critical
Business
Critical
Mission
Critical
XAP WAN Gateway

15. Case Study
15

16. Solution
CASE STUDY: CLOUDIFY CUSTOMER
High
Availability
Data
Replication
Disaster
Recovery
Auto scaling
Self healing
Cross-zone, region, and cloud
redundancy
Automated lifecycle
management of PostgreSQL
+ Cassandra replication
Elastic Disaster Recovery
pattern
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 Technology-based concrete
process control and information
service
 Deployments across North
America
 Bi-directional messaging and
data transfer from web-
UI, mobile devices
 NoSQL and Relational data
stores for reporting/analytics
 Lacking disaster recovery and
high availability aspects
Problem

17. SAMPLE (INITIAL) ARCHITECTURE
17
Availability region (US-West: Oregon)
Data Volume
Internet EC2 Instance
mod_cluster
EC2 Instance
JBoss
Data Volume
EC2 Instance
EC2 Instance
PostgresSQL
Cassandra
4 recipes

18. EXTENDED ARCHITECTURE: CLOUDIFY DR SCENARIO
18
Region (US-West Oregon)
App Servers
PostgresSQL
Region (US-East Virginia)
PostgresSQL
Cloud #1 Cloud #2
Region (US-East Virginia )
PostgresSQL
Cloud #1 Cloud #2
App Servers
Region (US-West California)
PostgresSQL
Cloud #3
Region failure
occurs
Bootstrap another cloud in
a different region using the
same application recipe
used to bootstrap cloud #2
above*
Liveness poll
Liveness poll
Upon initial deployment, the primary deployment
of the application will be bootstrapped onto cloud
#1, another slightly modified application recipe
will be bootstrapped as cloud #2, polling cloud #1
for failure, and acting as a PostgresSQL db slave.
Turn Postgres slave into
master, Start app server
instances*
Copyright 2013 Gigaspaces. All Rights Reserved

19. DR and Cloud Economics
19

20. Copyright 2013 Gigaspaces. All Rights Reserved20
ELASTIC ON-DEMAND DR: COSTS*
Main Site (US-West) Warm DR Site (US-East) Hot DR Site
Cost $82,068 $12,625 $82,068
 Main Site
 1 Load balancer, 2 JBoss instances, 1 PostgreSQL master, 3 Cassandra
 DR Site
 1 PostgreSQL slave – All other instance start on demand upon failover
What if we deploy on different clouds?
*Costs calculated using http://planforcloud.com

21. Copyright 2013 Gigaspaces. All Rights Reserved21
ELASTIC DR: WARM DR COST, CLOUD PORTABILITY
4 recipes
DR Site
$12k
SameRecipe
$14k
$6k
$5k
$9k

22. Copyright 2013 Gigaspaces. All Rights Reserved22
ELASTIC DR: HOT DR COST
4 recipes
DR Site
$82k
SameRecipe
$79k
$115k
$68k
$91k

23. Demo – AWS DR across regions
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=U-PdZe1g_yw
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