Surviving a catastrophe: An experiment of a regionally geographically diverse clustered database network architecture

In the wake of hurricane Katrina, the largest monetary natural disaster in American history, even the United States Federal Government's disaster plans were found to be lacking 4 years after the events of September 11, 2001. Computers have become a critical component of modern organizations and are critical to the continued operations of almost every modern organization. Continuity of critical computerized operations has become as essential as financial and accounting controls to modern business. Poor recovery techniques costs companies billion of dollars annually and some senior managers their professional reputations and positions. It is hard to believe that for under {dollar}50,000 most companies could provide continuous operations of critical database systems before, during and after a catastrophic mission critical computer facility failure (Higgins, 2005). The impact of the failure to plan, as well as a commercially available off the shelf solution will be investigated in this experiment.