Dual Data Centers

Abstract

Since the attacks of September 11, 2001, many companies have started to move their data to two or more data centers located a few kilometers away from each other to account for possible threats by terrorists, warfare, natural disaster etc. General awareness has risen to the fact that a whole data center could fail. Surveys taken toward the end of the last century and valid until today have shown that more than 90% of all companies that suffered a total data loss did not survive the following years. They could neither reach, inform, nor bill their customers, who then walked away to the competition. The risk of not surviving a major blow to the informational infrastructure has shown to be so high as to warrant the expense of running a second, redundant data center just for availability purposes.

This chapter does not contain any Easy Sailing part. That it because dual data center setups simply are not easy.