Experiences with Building Disaster Recovery for Enterprise-Class Clouds

The ability to recover from disasters is an important requirement for many enterprises. With enterprise-class workloads increasingly hosted on the cloud, cloud customers have come to expect disaster recovery (DR) as a necessary feature from cloud platforms. This paper identifies key challenges in providing DR as a service on enterprise cloud platforms, and portrays DR solutions for a managed cloud platform. In particular, we present the reference architecture for DR solutions, and describe our practical experiences in providing a portfolio of DR solutions for the cloud platform. The solutions cover diverse target recovery sites, such as an equivalent cloud site, a dedicated recovery site, and a customer-owned site. From the experiences, we provide insights into and lessons on implementing DR for enterprise-class clouds.