IT departments typically run four broad classes of service in the data centre: mission critical, business critical, business
operational and administrative services. Which service falls into which category is normally agreed between the business units and
the IT department by determining the importance of various business processes and how these map on to IT systems. Each class, and
possibly individual services, will have service level agreement (SLAs). In turn, these demand different levels of protection against
failure, whether caused by hardware or software problems, administrative error, data loss or corruption or disasters of various sorts.
Problems that make the data unavailable, through hardware or software failure, require a different solution to those that make the
underlying data itself unavailable, either through corruption or deletion.
Services considered mission critical require technical solutions that include both a service availability and a disaster recovery
component as part of a full business continuity plan (BCP). The 'best practice' data centre infrastructure design patterns for many
of the pieces needed for such solutions: local area networks, storage area networks, systems management, security, provisioning and
clustering are described in detail in the 'Data Centre Reference Implementation' white paper.
This document discusses the options for meeting the SLAs for mission and business critical services with particular reference to
the Sun Cluster software. Where multiple solutions exist, the underlying complementary technologies: disk mirroring, data replication,
transaction monitors and database replication techniques, are examined to highlight the trade-offs that must be made when using
certain hardware and software combinations.
The broader topic business continuity involves the consideration of more than just system availability and disaster recovery. This
white paper does not cover any aspects of the disaster planning required for telecommunications, staffing or physical infrastructure,
such as buildings, desks, etc.
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