Disaster Recovery
Disaster Recovery is provided to customers who have a primary deployment in one data center but require a geographically diverse location for their disaster recovery site. This offering provides business continuity through testing and restoration of servers in the state’s consolidated data centers. The offering includes:
- Regular (as defined by the user) backup of data
- A process by which authorized users can request recovery of data or files
- Reporting on backups provided via the Shared Technology Services portal
- Review backup schedule with Customer annually
- Provide annual disaster recovery testing
Technology Features
Simple, scalable replication and disaster recovery orchestration
- DR script automation and one-click failover and failback for easy implementation and simple operation
- Automated discovery of outages with failover to minimize operational disruptions
- Fast VM, application, and storage snapshot replication, enabling sub-minute RPOs and near zero RTOs
Verifiable recovery and automated compliance reporting
- Validate DR replicas via copy data management to ensure they can be put into production if needed
- Test upgrades and patches
- Automated compliance reporting
Scalable, cost-optimized cloud data mobility
- Easily back up, recover, and move data and workloads to/from/within/between clouds
- Reduce costs with minimal infrastructure requirements in the cloud or on-premises
- Optimize cloud vs on-premises location of data and workloads via policy-driven automation
Geographically Separate Data Centers
The STS environment provides two mirrored sites within the state of Arkansas. The primary production site is in the central Arkansas area, and a secondary site in northwest Arkansas is used for production (for applications with high-availability requirements) as well as development and test workloads. The secondary site is also the D/R site. Network connectivity between the data centers consists of geographically separate and redundant network circuits.
DR Testing
The Commvault backup solution used within STS provides the ability automate disaster recovery processes and test the processes in an isolated “network bubble” so that the test does not interfere with any production work. DIS will work with the Customer (as defined in the roles and responsibilities document) to develop and implement the disaster recovery processes and test plans.
Offline Backups
DIS will need to work with Customer to define requirements for offline backups (e.g., tape). DIS is providing a tape backup solution for the primary purpose of catastrophic ransomware protection. The recommendation for all other backups (unless required for regulatory compliance reasons) is to backup using the online backup solution (Commvault/HPE Apollo) and leverage commercial or government cloud options (Azure or AWS) for long term archival.
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DIS Responsibilities
Unless otherwise included in agency-specific service agreements, any subscriber to DIS shared services will automatically be enrolled in the shared services disaster recovery offerings. The base level disaster recovery service offerings provided to all subscribers will include daily backups of all subscribed applications/systems, local backup retention for 30 days, extended retention up to 180 days on magnetic tape.
Unless otherwise included in agency-specific service agreements, DIS will restore all subscribed applications/systems to a last known good state or customer identified restoration point.
Unless otherwise included in agency specific service agreements, DIS is responsible for the restoration of core infrastructure systems as identified in the customer provide applications/systems build documentation; DIS will maintain a repository of customer submitted application/system build documentation.
Unless otherwise included in agency specific service agreements, all application/system dependances not subscribed to the DIS shared services are the responsibility of each agency in the event of a restoration event or disaster recovery exercises.
Unless otherwise included in agency specific service agreements, disaster recovery testing will be scheduled by DIS and customers will be notified 60 days prior to recovery exercise as outlined in the “Disaster Recovery Testing Standards” document.
DIS will provide adequate hardware to support the restoration of production applications/systems in the shared services infrastructure.
Customer Responsibilities
Unless otherwise included in agency specific service agreements, all shared service customers will be required to complete an application/server build survey that will include information identified in the “Disaster Recovery Application and Systems Documentation Standards” document.
Unless otherwise included in agency specific service agreements, all shared service customers will be responsible for maintaining application/server build documentation and submitting any changes to “Email Address/TBD”.
Unless otherwise included in agency-specific service agreements, after the restoration of subscribed applications/systems, customers are responsible for the configuration, support and troubleshooting of the recovered applications/systems.
Unless otherwise included in agency specific service agreements, each shared service customer is responsible for scheduling their respective testing dates/time after being notified by DIS of an upcoming DR exercise as outlined in the “Disaster Recovery Testing Standards” document.