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How to minimize downtime of Internet Banking Application during DR Drill.

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Hi,

During DR Drill of the Internet Banking Application we change the domain pointer (A Record) of the domain name to the public IP of DR site. But this takes around 4 to 24 hours to take affect over DNS Servers. This 4 to 24 hour downtime seems very awkward. Is there any way to eliminate this downtime?

Thanks,

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In reply to How to minimize downtime of Internet Banking Application during DR Drill.

Clarifications

No. That is just how long the change takes to propagate.

In reply to How to minimize downtime of Internet Banking Application during DR Drill.

And 4 to 24 hours is really quite good, actually.

I wouldn’t rely on DNS for this…

In reply to How to minimize downtime of Internet Banking Application during DR Drill.

If you’re only method to get users to reach the application at the DR location is by changing a DNS record, I don’t consider this isn’t an excellent/well designed failover/DR process.

In the lowest-cost scenario you should look into running the application live at both locations, with DNS records pointing to both (one A record can have multiple IPs)

There are also 3rd party DNS providers who can detect and failover the DNS record for you so it’s not manual, and not a 24-hour wait, see: http://www.ultradns.com/Services/DNS-Traffic-Services/SiteBacker
…just one example

In a better but more costly scenario you would work with your colocation/datacenter provider to have an action plan in place (either automatic or manual failover) to re-route traffic hitting the public IP to go to the other location, or consider anycast, or a BGP fail-over implementation.

There is a solution

In reply to How to minimize downtime of Internet Banking Application during DR Drill.

You can use CISCO’s Global Site Selector. Our bank used this recently and the change happened in minutes.
V Srinivasan

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