Comparing high availability and disaster recovery

To determine the correct architecture for a high-availability or disaster-recovery deployment, you must understand the differences between them.

• Highly available deployments exhibit little or no downtime when an individual hardware or software element fails. In highly available deployments, enterprise users typically invest in the increased cost of highly available disk, network, and database resources that can tolerate failure and recover without interruption in service or loss of data. Typical highly available deployments are implemented within a single data center because these deployments have high demands on local resources to provide fault tolerance.

• Disaster recovery deployments are designed to handle cases of disaster. In disaster recovery deployments, some amount of downtime and loss of data are tolerated by the enterprise user. Disaster recovery implementations typically span geographies and data centers over a WAN to provide increased protection from events that could affect any individual data center.

Typical TrueSight Server Automation enterprise users deploy, at a minimum, an architecture that allows recovery in case of disaster. Some enterprise users also choose to invest in the costs associated with high availability, in addition to the disaster-recovery implementation.