Managing risk around IT infrastructure is a core requirement of every business. For customers with JADE applications, these are often mission-critical parts of the IT infrastructure that would pose considerable risk to the organisation if they were unavailable.
The traditional approach to Disaster Recovery (DR) has involved creating a fully duplicated environment in a geographically diverse data centre and using the JADE Synchonised Database Service (SDS) to maintain a hot standby.
The main issue with this approach is that the cost for a secondary environment is similar to the cost for the original primary – and could even be more depending on the specifics of the remote data centre. In addition, there is associated work in the networking and security configurations to ensure that users and services can continue to access the system after it has been successfully cut over to the standby system.
World Vision UK, a longstanding Jade customer, needed to provide Disaster Recovery for their JADE based donor management system. As a charity, every dollar is important, and keeping administration costs, including Information Technology, as low as possible is an aim.
Working with our Jade client services team, World Vision was able to provision a DR instance on Amazon Web Services (AWS) and within the EEC. We used Amazon EC2 reserved instances to replicate their JADE system in near real-time using SDS. The Amazon reserved instances are very small, and economic to run – while providing the risk mitigation that World Vision required. In the event of a cutover, the Amazon EC2 instance can be instantly scaled up to production size. Obviously, billing for the large instance is only in effect while the secondary data centre is being used for production workloads.
Australasian company, Tenderlink Ltd, was running production on-prem in a New Zealand based data centre. Their Australian customers required data to be resident within Australia to meet regulatory requirements.
We used Amazon EC2 instances to migrate their Production environment on to AWS in Sydney while replicating back to the NZ data centre with SDS for DR. This has enabled Tenderlink to provision the hot standby required to keep their systems available and meet a regulatory requirement for their customers. The JADE SDS connection is working very satisfactorily across the trans-Tasman link, a tribute to the efficiency of this native JADE implementation.
For JADE users who are concerned about Disaster Recovery, the combination of JADE SDS and Amazon Web Services is a compelling one. As an AWS Partner Network (APN) Partner, Jade has considerable experience in configuring and managing these environments on behalf of ourselves, and our customers.
If you are interested in this concept and would like to learn more, please let us know below, or contact your local Jade office. We would love to help.