Questions[business-continuity](server)

Background

One of my clients is an IT-dependent workflow-driven law firm with about 50 seats. They have been audited by one of their clients (an FSA regulated mortgage lender) and told that their single-site is a threat to business continuity. I have proposed that we partition their business into two bits:

1. Client-side - PCs, monitors, chairs, desks, LAN switches and router and firewall

2. Server-side - The Virtual Machines running Active Directory, Exchange, SQL, SharePoint and other line-of-business apps, "robot" worker machines and Remote Desktop Services (around 14 VMs in total)

The idea is that we can store equipment and put arrangements in place to quickly reproduce at least a reduced-capacity client-side environment at an alternative location, or even have users connect from their homes if required.

The Server-side represents a greater challenge, as it includes services published from their (currently ADSL, soon to be 100 Mbps fibre) IP connection and about 3TB data, not including backups. I have proposed that we move the entire server-side environment out of their current self-hosted on-site server rooms and into a hosted facility. I still want the same level of privacy - this has to be firewalled off from the internet except for the small number of published services, and they would be best served from a web-server VM in a DMZ.

Currently there are two server rooms, each containing one node of a replicated SAN and one Hyper-V cluster host. Coupled with redundant fibre-channel and Ethernet links this means the system will keep running even if a whole server room is lost. I want the hosted server-side environment to be similarly resilient to single data-centre loss.

Basically, I want the security, availability and control I get from local self-hosting, but in the cloud, with geopraphical diversity of at least 30 km. I also don't really want to be buying kit and racking it myself and worrying about hardware lifespan and replacement, backups etc.

Questions

1. Is the replicating SAN and Hyper-V Cluster something I should try to replicate in the data-centre, or do large hosters & cloud providers have other ways of ensuring availability?

2. It looks like Amazon AWS has all the bits necessary (EC2, EBS, S3, VPC, VPN etc), but only one EU data centre. What kind of availability can I expect? E.g. If they have a major outage in their Ireland datacentre (imagine an aircraft landing on it, for example), what will happen to the services hosted there? And what about general reliability issues?

3. Can this be done at all using Windows Azure, Rackspace Cloud, or any other cloud service provide?

Thanks for considering my question.

My company is looking for outside assistance in (re)putting together our BC and DR plans.

How do you judge companies from one another in this arena?

I'm setting up an offsite DR facility on a budget. The office has 2 ADSL lines coming in to identical router/modem devices.

I'm looking for a cost effective (cheap) way of joining the two connections so that the network only sees one link to the outside world.

Primarily I'm looking for ADSL failover as opposed to load balancing and bonding but if the solution does all theree then that's fine.

Is anyone aware of a device that does this, or alternatively software that could be installed on a PC with multiple NIC's to manage this sort of thing?

Thanks in advance.

I am considering changing my backup strategy from using backup tape to using a product from EMC called Avamar. I have a Corp Data Center and a Disaster recovery Data Center. The plan is to put Avamar units in both DC's and replicate between the two fulfilling our SLAs requirement for off site backups. I was just pitched the Avamar product and was impressed, now I want the cold hard facts about the solution. What are the pros and Cons of going this route and what is the good the bad and the ugly with the Avamar product?

We have all of our corporate servers co-loc'd in a secure data center about an hour away that serves many Terminal Services remote apps to our local clients. We have a speedy network connection between our office and the data center and average about 99.9% uptime (during normal business hours) per year. However, there's always the opportunity for the internet to go down and thus all of our remote apps will cease to function.

Also, the remote apps must run from the data center (assume that there is a very very good reason for this that I cannot break) so placing a local copy is not possible.

Unfortunately our office is poorly wired: we only have a single "last mile" provider in town nor is it feasible to run new fiber to the building.

So, I need some short-term recovery techniques to get us thru a minor outage (lasting at most a single day). Anything more than a day and we'll go to a pre-designated off-site facility to continue operation.

We do have Cisco Client VPN capability so any IP-based network should suffice. I'd like to keep recurring maintenance costs to a minimum since it would be seldom used.

We have at most 15 people using Terminal Services and then about another 20-30 using the internet. The core requirement would be to keep those 15 people going; the rest of the office can continue to function (albeit at reduced output) without internet but if this solution can cover them that's a bonus.

I have a couple of different options that I can think of:

1. Cable modem. It's not particularly fast but it's fairly cheap to maintain on a monthly basis. Would be easy to go into the networking closet and swap out the internet to our gateway router. I don't know whether or not they'd piggy back on the same fiber to our location, though.
2. Wireless LAN. Something that uses the 3G wi-fi in the area. This seems like the most convenient but are there plans out there that don't cost $1M a month to maintain (something very cheap and then a reasonable bump up when we used it would be best) and require extensive hardware costs?
3. Satellite. Is that even fast enough to use RDP?
4. Consumer individual Wifi. What about AT&T (etc.) USB wifi cards? They are certainly fast enough to run a single user's RDP; the cards themselves are pretty cheap but the networking plans add up $$ really quick..

Is there another option I'm overlooking? What do you have for primary internet connectivity loss recovery (provided another last-mile provider is out of the question)? Thanks!!