Patent ID: 8266473

Claim:
A method of performing disaster recovery in architecture comprising a production site and a recovery site adapted for being coupled together by a packet-based network, comprising: storing a plurality of mirrored copies of at least part of the production site, wherein each of the plurality of mirrored copies represents a change occurring on at least part of the production site; detecting a problem with the production site; in response to the detection of the problem, autonomously setting operating rules relative to an operating domain of the production site and the recovery site, wherein the rules direct the operating domain to interact with an external control system not controlled by said operating domain, and automatically reconfiguring the packet-based network so that attempts to access the production site via the packet-based network are routed to the recovery site, wherein a first of the plurality of stored mirrored copies corresponds to a stable operating condition of the production site and a second of the plurality of stored mirrored copies corresponds to the most recent transaction of the production site, and wherein the first and second stored mirrored copies are accessible at the recovery site; selecting a recovery server on the recovery site from a pool of recovery servers by retrieving hardware characteristics associated with a production server on the production site and matching those characteristics with the hardware characteristics of the recovery servers in the pool on the recovery site; determining, in response to a resolution of the problem, whether the most recent transaction of the production site caused the problem; if the most recent transaction of the production site did not cause the problem, copying the second of the plurality of the stored mirrored copies to an application server associated with the production site; and if the most recent transaction of the production site caused the problem, copying the first of the plurality of the stored mirrored copies to the application server associated with the production site.