5.1 Infrastructure Protection
There are two considerations for protecting the building blocks that make up the physical infrastructure—local availability, referring to the single physical data center, and cross-site availability, referring to the business continuity processes that are undertaken when either a partial or complete data center incident takes place on the first site.
Local availability is achievable through employing a number of technologies and strategies to prevent service disruption when either a single component or multiple components fail. The following tactics can together form a strategy to mitigate these types of component failures:
• Redundant hardware to eliminate single points of failure.
• Employing vSphere clustering and HA technologies to return services to an online state in case of host outage.
• Use of snapshots to quickly return to a previous healthy state in response to application failure or corruption resulting from operating system of application updates.
• Securing data both onsite and off-site to prevent data loss through traditional backup and replication mechanisms.
Figure 9. Infrastructure Component Availability
