IT Services DR Day – Ensuring Business Continuity for the UCD Community

In accordance with best practice, IT Services is gearing up for the ninth Disaster Recovery (DR) day, which will take place on Saturday, 6 July, 06:00-22:00. In order to ensure the highest service availability, IT Services annually test the robustness of our services and recovery systems in preparation for an unforeseen event such as cyber crime, natural disaster, and system failures.

IT Services will be testing the recovery capabilities of all our infrastructure; there are two data centres on campus each of which can operate independently while providing a full set of services. We perform tests every year to ensure that this infrastructure architecture functions correctly.

This necessary work carries a high risk of disruption to a wide range of IT services (including core services such as wireless, staff file share, single sign on, networks services, business systems, data centre storage and hosting) therefore ALL IT systems and services are at risk and may be temporarily unavailable during this time.

What will happen on Disaster Recovery Day?

We will begin DR day by testing all the network components which provide connectivity to the Internet and network connectivity to all the buildings on campus and the network to Blackrock, St Vincents, Mater, Crumlin and Lyons farm to ensure connectivity in the event of loss of various components. The network to the applications, servers and storage hosted on campus will be tested as well as the failover of the wireless networks to ensure continued successful operation in the event of a central wireless controller failure.

We then test the storage infrastructure which is used by all the on-site servers and provides shared storage for many departments. The objective is to ensure that in the event of losing a data centre, the storage will failover successfully to the ‘live’ data centre and continue to function as normal. The final test checks that the servers which run the various applications will failover successfully in the event of loss of a data centre.

This work is carefully orchestrated to take place in one day to minimise impact to the UCD Community and IT Services would like to thank you for your cooperation during this time. As a result of this work, we can continue to provide a high level of availability to our customers in the knowledge that tests have been performed successfully and IT Services are prepared for unforeseen events.