End-to-end disaster recovery planning: From art to science

We present the design and implementation of ENDEAVOUR - a framework for integrated end-to-end disaster recovery (DR) planning. Unlike existing research that provides DR planning within a single layer of the IT stack (e.g. storage controller based replication), ENDEAVOUR can choose technologies and composition of technologies across multiple layers like virtual machines, databases and storage controllers. ENDEAVOUR uses a canonical model of available replication technologies at all layers, explores strategies to compose them, and performs a novel map-search-reduce heuristic to identify the best DR plans for given administrator requirements. We present a detailed analysis of ENDEAVOUR including empirical characterization of various DR technologies, their composition, and a end-to-end case study. ©2010 IEEE.