Building a secondary site for.HK Ben Lee HKIRC 02 March 2010

2 Agenda 1. Why building a secondary site for.hk 2. Objectives 3. Business Drivers 4. Implementation Options 5. Considerations 6. Current status and roadmap

Why building a secondary site? Currently co-located at a single primary site It is built with a high degree of resilience, e.g. network multi-homing, high-availability cluster, redundant servers & hardware etc. Nevertheless, the probability of the primary site breaking down totally is not negligible. Also, trying to shorten the downtime for planned maintenance and upgrade work. 3

Objectives Provide a higher service level and availability Provide means for business continuity Provide additional capacity and alternative path in case of malicious attack (e.g. DDoS) Provide alternative choice of site, apart from existing colocation vendor, and facilitate the relocation of site with minimum downtime Provide IPv6 capabilities 4

Business Drivers Tangible - quantify the impact How much revenue will be lost if we have N mins of total system failure How many complaints will be received if we have N mins of total system failure Intangible Reputation Public image Stakeholders feedback – e.g. Government 5

Technical Design Considerations Automatic failover using routing Traffic management with load balancers Database synchronization or near-real time replication Platform diversity and virtual machine server technology Application changes may be required 6

Implementation Options Option 1 - Fully active sites, with load balancing and synchronized data Option 2 - partially active sites, with load balancing and delayed data replication Option 3 - Hot standby site 7

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Implementation Options 11

Comparison checklists Improve Service Availability before failure Improve Service Availability after failure Data Integrity at the secondary site Time to recover if primary site failure Time to recover if secondary site failure Time to fail-back from secondary to primary site Manual intervention in case of failover Capacity to handle DDoS attack Systems utilization / load sharing by secondary site Complexity of solution Initial capital investment Operational/Recurring cost 12

Current status and roadmap Dec - Option 2 was chosen Jan - RFP published - Secondary Site.pdf Mar - Deadline for proposal submission Apr-May - Selection and appointment of vendor Jun-Sep - Proof of Concept, implementation Sep - Failover Drill Oct - Production 13

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