229. Is HA/DR Worth It? The Costs/Benefits of Disaster Recovery & High Availability

[@rockymarquiss8327]

You did a FANTASTIC job of explaining HA/DR. I personally would use a very slightly different definition of HA but it's very minor - HA is the ability an application to keep running without unplanned outages. There are times that an application requirement has a scheduled downtime for various reasons. While you do cover that in the 5 9's, etc. it depends on the application requirements - not all applications run 24 hrs a day. You cover all of the nuances and this is really nit picking - I get it... :) A solid HA/DR plan will not only entail decisions on hardware, power redundancy, etc as you describe, but regardless of what model of DR & HA strategy that is implemented, a very crucial piece of information that needs to be i the documentation are the vendor names and contact information of all of the necessary pieces from hardware, software and service providers. Licensing has to be considered. Many software licenses can be very expensive - do you purchase duplicate licensing - one for production and one for the HA site? Some vendors will provide a DR/HA licensing at a reduced rate if you're using the HA site strictly as a mirrored site for DR vs keeping everything up and running while you do maintenance on the production site..... if you're doing the mirroring for DR purposes you can may be able to purchase one set of licenses, in the event of data center failure (building burns down, floods, severe power outage, fiber cut, etc) you contact all of the vendors to have the licenses temporarily transferred. That document of vendor names & contacts needs to be in physical form - you may not have access to a digital version - and you need a physical copy offsite but where it can be readily accessed. A six month - or at most 12 month audit of vendors information and contacts on that documentation is necessary - you may have purchased additional software, additional licensing, company may have changed names & contact information.... A good, solid, DR can take a lot of work to get set up and documented - and as you stated, it's like insurance. If you never use insurance you've wasted a lot of money - but if you ever do it's money well spent. If you never use that DR plan you spent a lot of time and energy for "nothing" - but if you ever need it, it's time and energy well spent.

[@IAmTimCorey]

Thanks for sharing!

[@ivanjasenov1220]

It's a good idea to show up a demo on that topic on how to choose and play with such services on Azure(for example). This will be more of Architecture side but I think will be great to have it.

[@IAmTimCorey]

I have a complete course on the topic as well as multiple videos here on KZbin on how to do so, but more are coming.

[@TranMinh-q2u]

I never know we have such a swap feature in Azure 😮 that's so convenient

[@IAmTimCorey]

Absolutely.