Evaluating and modelling solutions for disaster recovery

Abstract

Systems outages can have disastrous effects on businesses such as data loss, customer dissatisfaction, and subsequent revenue loss. Disaster recovery (DR) solutions have been adopted by companies to minimise the effects of these outages. However, the selection of an optimal DR solution is difficult since there does not exist a single solution that suits the requirement of every company (e.g., availability and costs). In this paper, we propose an integrated model-experiment approach to evaluate DR solutions. We perform experiments in different real-world DR solutions and propose analytic models to evaluate these solutions regarding DR key-metrics: steady-state availability, recovery time objective (RTO), recovery point objective (RPO), downtime, and costs. The results reveal that DR solutions can significantly improve availability and minimise costs. Also, a sensitivity analysis identifies the parameters that most affect the RPO and RTO of the DR adopted solutions.