Low Cost Disaster Recovery solution in Cloud

Our low-cost DR approach is based on three main premises:
Avoid idle compute resources. After calculating the number of servers needed to host critical interactive sessions, local batch jobs, and additional infrastructure severs, we relocated batch servers from the main site to the DR site.
Relocating servers allowed us to avoid approximately USD 2.5 million in server purchases and also helped ensure that servers in the DR site have high utilization rates running batch jobs on a daily basis.
If a disaster occurs at the main site, the DR servers can be removed from the batch pool and used for their DR purpose.

Use a tiered storage solution. We matched data replication mechanisms to the engineers’ RPO and RTO definitions. Also, to reduce storage costs, we implemented a tiered data storage solution using a combination of Fibre Channel (FC) and Serial Advanced Technology Attachment (SATA) disks.
FC disks—about 20 percent of total DR site storage capacity—are used for I/O-intensive loads, such as those resulting from batch jobs.
SATA disks—about 80 percent of total DR site storage capacity—are used for data that would only be required for interactive work in case of disaster.
Although SATA disk performance is lower than FC disk performance, our tests, conducted with design engineers, proved that the throughput is acceptable for a DR scenario.
By investing in low-cost SATA storage instead of more costly FC disks, we estimated a savings of more than USD 250,000.
Offload main site backup. Although a backup library is required at the DR site, we wanted to avoid investing in a new library and the associated drives and tapes that would be used only in case of a disaster and would sit idle the rest of the time. Our solution was to offload backup from the main site to the DR site. As part of our disaster-recovery efforts, data was already being replicated daily to the DR site. Instead of backing up data at the main site, we used the DR site’s replicated data to create the backup copy.
Because we simply relocated a backup tape library from the main site to the DR site, we did not need to purchase an additional backup library for the DR site. This strategy saved Intel about USD 350,000.
Table 1 summarizes some of the ways in which our DR strategy met
our goals