Disaster recovery can be separated into two categories, minor and major. A minor disaster can be described as a hardware failure affecting the database server or application server at the data-centre, or a loss of power at the data-centre. A major disaster can be described as a total loss of all facilities in the region housing Chemwatch infrastructure, eg. a bomb going off rendering the whole of Northern California unreachable.
In the event of a major disaster, the first thing to do would be to check the Service Health Dashboard and contact AWS support in order to determine the next steps. If nothing can be done at the primary data center then it is time to start to manually restore services at our fail-over AWS region from the latest copied snapshots there as follows:
Redirect domain name jr.chemwatch.net to the IP address of our DR server, this re-direct should not take more than 10 minutes to complete.
Restore the volumes of our application server from backups in our fail-over region, then launch our application server.
Restore our database from a backup in our fail-over region.
Make any necessary configuration changes to our application server, such as re-direction to our fail-over database.
Test login and major functions of our applications to confirm everything is functioning.