Seminar 10A - Designing Virtualization and Cloud Services into a High-Availability, Multitiered, Multilocation Data Center (separate registration required)

After surviving two significant natural disasters and numerous man-made ones, we thought virtualizing both our data centers and installing a geoclustered private cloud would be the way to keep critical systems running during the next major disaster. While writing our new disaster recovery plan, it became apparent that our strategy was flawed and growing in complexity beyond acceptable limits. In this session, participants will incorporate lessons learned on our campus to create an initial plan to match virtualization and cloud tools to a multitier infrastructure that maximizes the delivery of services under various adverse conditions. We will then progress through a multistep process including identifying critical information systems and non-IT personnel, creating and setting risk-adjusted recovery time objectives for each tier of a multitier data center infrastructure, brainstorming internal and external risks, incorporating virtualization and cloud services into the design, and completing an initial test of sufficiency using tail risk and cascading disruptive events.