The Civil Service Employees Pension Fund (CSEPF), Oman decided to create a Business Continuity (BC) and Disaster Recovery (DR) site to safeguard CSEPF business from all sorts of threats and crises. CSEPF considered all the criteria applicable for a business continuity site, which includes location, data centre infrastructure, communication infrastructure, workspace and accessibility, and the use of virtual machines (VM) and NetApp – Storage Brand – replication technology to guarantee the availability of the data.
As per service availability, CSEPF utilized a manual procedure on which servers will be re-LUN (logical unit number) manually from the DR site. For databases, CSEPF uses Oracle Data Guard for replicating data, from primary site to DR site.
The DR component of the business continuity plan was designed around the following requirements:
- recovery time objective (RTO);
- recovery point objective (RPO);
- distance between sites;
- cost (acquisition, operational, infrastructure).
Highly scalable solutions were employed to integrate with future technologies required to support future growth.