Disaster Recovery
Most services provided by servers at the University are essential for operations, and some are critical and should never suffer an unplanned outage. However, there is always the threat of loss of power for extended periods, network connections going down, or physical events like fire.
The VCU Computer Center has a satellite hot-site facility that can help plan for these circumstances. With the same positive attributes as the VCUCC computer room, this facility can provide a place for hosting redundant servers and storage so mission-critical systems can continue to function. Talk with us about your needs for disaster planning, and this hot-site could be part of the solution.
Contact the VCU Computer Center for questions or more information.
Virtual Machine Disaster Recovery Options:
The UCC has deployed VMware vSphere Replication that provides hypervisor-based virtual machine replication and recovery services. It protects virtual machines from partial or complete site failures by replicating the virtual machines from Pocahontas to Harris Hall's virtual infrastructure. Replications are defined individually for each VM. In the event of a declared disaster startup of servers at HH will begin once UCC staff are on-site at Harris Hall and logged in. The startup process takes about 15-30 minutes per VM. Servers with no DR plans will, for the most part, be replicated without any action from administrators using a Recovery Point Objective (RPO) of 24 hours. For these servers, recovery in the event of a disaster will be the best effort after priority servers are addressed.
To request this service enter "Request disaster recovery" in Cherwell's Service Action field.
Formal recovery Plans can be written to be reviewed by UCC staff for a fee of $1000 for the initial year and $500 for review years. Annual reviews are performed in the March time frame. The DR onboarding/annual process will discuss requirements such as RTOs and provide services such as making the network provisioning requests to run the individual servers on the Harris Hall infrastructure. TS Directors will decide the priority of the recovery servers with DR plans.
There are other recovery options available for those groups that require a more robust recovery option. These options require pricing that is dependent on individual needs.
This article was updated: 07/8/2020