Florida State University

Executive summary: 

FSU was looking for an AWS partner that could reimagine and rethink its legacy Disaster Recovery solution that was hosted in a physical data center. Enquizit was selected based on its strong cloud experience and stellar company reputation. Enquizit worked closely with FSU’s BCDR Program Director and FSU-ITS (Central IT) to implement CloudEndure DR, SkyMap™, and other AWS orchestration and automation tools to deliver an AWS cloud-based DR solution that met FSU’s DR objectives.

Business Challenge / Problem Detail:

In the wake of Hurricane Michael, FSU leadership called for a refresh of its existing Disaster Recovery (DR) solution. Hurricane Michael was a Category 5 storm that landed just west of Tallahassee, Florida, in October 2018, devastating the surrounding areas. FSU understood at the time the University required a high-confidence DR solution to support an actual disaster declaration with long-term continuity of operations. As a result, FSU leadership established guidelines for its new DR solution to meet or exceed a sub 1 hour Recovery Time Objective (RPO) and 8 hour Recovery Time Objective (RTO).

Shortly after Hurricane Michael, FSU began to plan the transition of its traditional Business Continuity and Disaster Recovery (BCDR) approach to a more modern approach using AWS as its DR platform. The new BCDR approach was also going to help FSU accelerate its public cloud adoption efforts by implementing a sound AWS foundation in support of future cloud-based use cases at the University.

In early 2019, FSU conducted a competitive solicitation that sought to bring the vendor community forward with solutions closely aligned to mission objectives. Of the many technology partners and proposed vendor solutions reviewed by FSU, one company and its approach to solving the problem stood out as an overall excellent fit – Enquizit. FSU and Enquizit began working on the DR project in August of 2019 with a planned completion date in May of 2020. 

Hurricane Michael is just one example of the ongoing challenges Gulf states face with recurring natural storms. Hurricane Harvey in 2017 and Hurricane Katrina in 2005 are potent reminders of type devastation these storms can cause businesses and communities in the Gulf of Mexico region.

Even before Hurricane Michael in 2018, such as the Category 1 storm Hurricane Hermine that hit FSU directly in 2016, FSU recognized its legacy DR site was incapable of meeting the organization’s scope and needs. Therefore FSU began to make plans for a next-generation disaster recovery solution – Hurricane Michael just advanced the timeline for project initiation. Also in 2018, FSU completed a business impact analysis exercise, so a prioritized set of application business systems including requirements for RPO and RTOs, was well understood. The challenge became to survey the marketplace for solutions delivering the highest value in meeting FSU’s BCDR requirements.

In early 2019, FSU conducted a competitive solicitation that sought to bring the vendor community forward with solutions closely aligned to mission objectives. Of the many technology partners and proposed vendor solutions reviewed by FSU, one company and its approach to solving the problem stood out as an overall excellent fit – Enquizit. FSU and Enquizit began working on the DR project in August of 2019 with a planned completion date in May of 2020.

Output / Our Solution:

Enquizit listened to the needs of FSU, presented design options, and delivered a very capable and cost-effective DR solution. IT disaster recovery was transitioned from the physical colocation hosting site in Atlanta to the Amazon Web Services (AWS) platform. 

As the many specific design elements of the DR project were being rationalized, what became evident is that the use of a Pilot Light scenario was going to be essential in meeting the aggressive RTO and RPO requirements of FSU. To be specific, replicating file and database backups to the cloud then instantiating services from those backups was not an option – continuous data replication was determined to be the approach to data protection for FSU’s DR solution.

Enquizit knew CEDR was going to play a significant role in the overall solution design (in terms of % hosts). However, it was not clear if CEDR was a complete solution to handle all replication patterns required by FSU –  including ~20TB of NAS files, and a large Oracle database host platform running on Exadata with RAC. Understanding the requirements for all FSU replication patterns was vital to develop a DR solution with a fresh perspective and in a manner that was innovative, practical, cost-effective, and manageable.

Critical design elements that surfaced during the project were:

Reduce cost

Ability to fine-tune performance

Ability to use native Oracle features like Data Guard replication and remote listener functionality

The DR solution delivered to FSU is representative of the following:

Tooling (Tools and Technologies): 

AWS: Control Tower, DirectConnect, Bring-Your-Own-IP, CloudEndure DR, Lambda Functions, Step Functions, CloudFormation, EC2, EBS, S3. Oracle Data Guard, RISC Networks, N2WS, Buurst SoftNAS, and Enquizit SkyMap™