Is your cloud server in the same bit barn as your DR site? Microsoft is about to launch a “Geo” for Azure in Australia and has decided that the way to do so down under is by co-locating its kit in an as-yet-unidentified third-party bit barn. There's nothing new about that: Rackspace and VMware definitely do it for their cloud services. Amazon Web Services is reputed to do so but will …
I don't get what you're trying to say about Amazon. Their requirements are that you have systems across different availability zones. So you use EU zones a and b. Then because you know what you're doing, you have a DR site in US and your backups get stored in Rackspace's APAC site and mirrored to somewhere else.
What does it matter who else might be using the same datacentres? It's the cloud. It's out there, you don't care where. If you're going to start worrying about exactly where stuff is, you may as well start buying your own datacentres.
Do you pay lots of money for a BMW and then start asking if they've actually installed the side airbags in the car you bought and pulling off the door panels? No, you trust them.
Do you pay some money for AWS and then start asking exactly where they host things and trying to figure out if there are shared datacentres? No, you trust them.
Let us suppose you host your production system with a traditional provider, but your DR system is in the cloud. You want to make sure they aren't in the same campus (and certainly not in the same machine room).
Now you could place that DR system in a different geographic region. But for various reasons (Latency? Data Sovereignty?) that may not be a runner. So you need the cloud provider to share some basic geographic details with you.
Really, if you're betting this much on cloud, it's not unreasonable to have the cloud provider give you enough information. And if they don't, other vendors are available.
When I was an IT jockey, I discovered our DR site was in a place formerly called "The Natomas Basin". Now it is just called " North Natomas". I mentioned this to the PHB, who shrugged it off.
North Natomas is protected from the seasonal flood waters by levies built in the age of steam and electric pumps which rely on the grid. These systems are guaranteed to enable the location to survive the projected 100 year flood. Don't know if the test case can survive the every eleven years El Nino events.
The Register 
Biting the hand that feeds IT
Copyright. All rights reserved © 1998–2024
