Hi,

Just wanted to see what peoples thoughts are regarding these two methods of providing resiliance and business continuity.


Pro's For Cutover

1 SRP Key/ID and License for BES (Cost savings - Mangement love that type of Pro!)

Cons Cutover

Need to keep patched to the same levels as Primary
Multiple step failover process (Possibly difficult / confusing for Support to perfom at 3 am if they not sure what to do)
BlackBerry Manager looks like a bombs gone off with multiple MDS CS / BBIM servers running if the 2 services are not split out to a different server.

Pros for Sourceless Move

Always on, ready when needed if there is a failure.
Easy to train someone to perform failover of users.
You know it will work and can test before a failure without interuption to users.
You can have one BES pointing to SRP.EU relay and one to SRP.NA relay build in RIM failure protection

Cons for Sourceles Move

In domino instance would the 2nd server would be wasted as you have to replicate the State DBS? Not so with exchange.
Costly extra licenses required.
You need to fail users across slowly to limit impact on BES.
Need to ensure there is always enough capacity to failover.


Also... I remeber implementing a 2nd server in a Domino BlackBerry Domain and having issues moving users to the 2nd server. Was this in 4.1.2? I think the user still had the service books for the old BES after the move and users were unable to activate and send mail / use the device.

I still think Neverfail is probably the bes fail over mechanisim but not always the most cost effective.... but you get what you pay for!!

Just interested on what people are using and what they feel to be the best.

Cheers

What is your RPO?
What is your RTO?

Both failover methods are fine by me. Cant wait for 5.0

I guess the RPO would be BES up and running with all users functioning fully and service functioning as before.

RTO would be ASAP...

Are these too general?

Yes, they're both too general

Example of something to guide a decision:

RPO - All users / settings within 1 hour of the failure
RTO - 30 minutes

The RPO decides how old the data can be that is "restored", and the RTO decides how long you have to get it back ... both (at an absolute minimum) need to be clearly defined for any SLA / HA / DR strategy.