Toward Building an IT Disaster Recovery Site for Oil and Gas Companies

Typiaclly, the main objective of any IT disaster recovery assessment is to support a sustainable long term Disaster Recovery (DR) Data Center and Facilities strategy, both from IT and Business perspectives. In this paper, we provide an outline for carefully building an IT disaster recovery site for data centers running highly critical scientific applications. By presenting the EXPEC Computer Center (ECC) of Saudi Aramco as an example, we show that careful considerations on the location of DR facilities, proper capacity planning, careful selection of data center tier type, and recovery timelines considerations are all crucial elements when assessing the feasibility and practicality of establishing the disaster recovery site.