About The John F Kennedy Center for Performing Arts
The Kennedy Center is the nation's busiest performing arts center, hosting approximately 2,000 events each year for audiences numbering more than 2 million. Since 1971, we have been bringing the world to Washington with magnificent performances of music, dance, theater, and more.
The Kennedy Center needed a cost effective way to not only ensure business continuity in the event of a critical systems failure, but they needed to also ensure that no ticket sales were lost in the moments leading up to the disaster recovery event.
The Challenge
Kennedy Center had a number of challenges with the DR requirements which sought to balance the cost, complexity and sophistication of their Disaster Recovery solution. These challenges included:
- Meet a RPO (Recovery Point Objective) of less than 1 minutes
- Meet a RTO (Recovery Time Objective) of less than 2 hours
- Minimize solution TCO (Total Cost of Ownership)
- Ensure software changes are immediately available to DR systems
- Ensure easy testing of the DR environment
The Solution
Kickstep Technologies was able to utilize several AWS services to meet the challenges presented by Kennedy Center. These included:
- AWS Server Migration Service to execute a "Lift and Shift" strategy for standing up the existing configuration within AWS
- AWS VPN and Direct Connect for establishing fast, low latency connectivity between the on-prem and AWS environments
- SQL Server AOA and AWS DMS for keeping databases and data in sync between on-prem and cloud servers
- Route 53 Private Zones and Workspace to provide end-user test environments
- Route 53 Public Zones and Health Checks to react immediately to DR situations
The Benefits
Benefit 1 - Overall cost is kept low as most DR server instances are in a stopped state. Instances that were required to run 24x7 are provisioned as low-cost configurations as their only job is to handle asynchronous data and software updates.
Benefit 2 - RPO and RTO objectives were met by supporting fast, asynchronous data replication between the on-prem and DR environment running at AWS
Benefit 3 - The DR configuration could be pre-configured as though it were the production environment. This minimizes that amount of software configuration changes needed when operating the DR environment as though it were production.
About Kickstep Technologies, Inc and Amazon Web Services
Kickstep Technologies is a leading technology firm providing cloud consulting, software development, data analytics and machine learning services. We use our experience to ensure clients have the best technical solutions to solve their business challenges and deliver value for their organization. We are fully committed to the success of our clients and commit to always putting their needs and interests before our own.