A Linux-Based Business Continuous Data Center: Aramco ECC Experience

In recent years, we have witnessed a growing interest in Business Continuity (BC) solutions to reach maximum availability of computing resources, where the main function is to provide a high available and smooth fail over and fail back processes. Our growing needs to provide world-class and high available computing resources to serve Saudi Aramco´s Oil and Gas Upstream Operations has given us the opportunity to evaluate and implement such Business Continuity solutions using the most commonly used enterprise solutions, and depending on the open source community to install, configure and manage the environment. In this paper, we describe our two models of Business Continuity: the active-active and active-passive modes. We also discuss the results of our fail over and fail back processes in terms of functionality, design and time. Our results show that business continuity is considered a viable option for large organizations, with some consideration in terms of return on investment (ROI) and operations.