This project is intended to build on the work of the deployment of new application and database tiers, to implement ways that we could provide more resilience beyond our current basic manual disaster recovery failover provision. Most systems can be failed over to a secondary site in the event of a major problem but require manual, attended intervention. Work to date has highlighted the myriad complexities for implementing this facility for services.

With this project we will look at a specific service and implement a basic automated failover facility to manage unplanned events in the infrastructure or application layer. This will form the basic building block for the next phase of the project. This second phase will look to deliver a general structure for each technology set used in our environment, highlighting what services fall into what category and producing guidance for how automated failover could be achieved. Exceptions will be highlighted. This information will be used to scope future work on all the services for implementation of automated failover facilities where deemed necessary.

RfC C1607-022