SPA Conference session: Strategies and Patterns for Systems Continuity

One-line description:Identifying the shape of survival; a workshop where participants identify architectures to allow system survival in the face of failure.
 
Session format: Workshop (150 mins) [read about the different session types]
 
Abstract:Recent changes to company law in Europe and the US mean that business continuity (that is, the ability of an organisation to continue to function in the event of a disaster or other disruption) is now a key concern. The role of IT in achieving business continuity is to ensure that critical systems achieve high availabilty (HA) in normal operation, and that in the case of disastrous failure, the crucial parts of the IT environment can be reliably and swiftly recovered to remote sites using a disaster recovery (DR) plan.

This has a significant implications for architects since these qualities must be designed into systems and infrastructures from the outset - it is very difficult to add such capabilities later on in the development lifecycle, or worse still, after deployment.

This session will explore possible solutions for high availability and disaster recovery, and how they can be combined to address possible threats that are faced by today's IT systems and infrastructure.
 
Audience background:Architects, designers, developers and managers involved in the development
of information systems.
 
Benefits of participating:The benefits to participants will include:

* Understanding why business continuity is high on the agenda in nearly all
IT environments.
* Learning how to identify what needs to be protected in order to ensure
availability, the availability threats that need to be mitigated and the
possible impact of not achieving this.
* Learning about commonly used architectural patterns for HA and DR.
* The chance to consider how effective existing patterns for HA and DR would
be for their own systems.
* The possibility of identifying novel solutions (or new combinations of
existing solutions) that could help to achieve resiliency for their systems.
 
Materials provided:* Presentation slides
* Documentation of some HA and DR solution patterns
* Description of example systems and failure scenarios
* Worksheets for the exercises
 
Process:* Introduce the objectives of the session and how it is organised

* Presentation 1: Setting the Scene
An initial presentation, setting the scene in terms of definitions that are important, common quantitative metrics used to define availability targets, the trade off between availability and cost, suitable targets for availability metrics in different environments, the availability risks that systems face and some of the common strategies used to mitigate them.

* Exercise 1: Identifying Threats and Risks
Split into groups and provide them with outline descriptions of large information systems. The groups should then identify the potential availability threats to the system, the risks to the systems that these threats imply and some appropriate targets for availability metrics. The groups will categorise the threats in order to allow broad themes to be identified, and we will collate the resulting themes.

* Presentation 2: Achieving Availability
A presentation explaining the common solutions for HA and DR that shows how they need to be used in combination to achieve the organisation's availability targets.

* Exercise 2: Applying Solutions
In the same groups, we'll provide some typical failure or disaster scenarios that the systems could face. Each group should identify combinations of solutions needed to surivive these situations, along with an assessment of their ability to meet their HA/DR targets, and any potential problems in deploying these solutions or invoking them in the face of a real disaster.

* Conclusions
The groups should prepare short presentations explaining their solutions and the conclusions they came to about them. As they do this, we'll capture an overall set.

* Summary
Brief summary of the session, where we examine the consolidated outputs of the group conclusions and see if there are any broad lessons to be taken away.
 
Detailed timetable:
 
Outputs:* Group conclusions
* Consolidated conclusions
* On flip charts and the conference Wiki
 
History:None
 
Presenters
1. Eoin Woods
UBS Investment Bank
2. Nick Rozanski
large UK retailer
3.