Understanding Bullhorn's Disaster Recovery Technology and Processes
This document describes Bullhorn’s disaster recovery technology and processes to ensure that Bullhorn delivers optimal reliability and scalability in the wake of a disaster.
Datacenter Overview
Bullhorn datacenters provide advanced protections that include seismically braced facilities and racks, redundant heating, ventilation and air conditioning, Very-Early Smoke Detection Alarm (VESDA) and dual-interlock fire suppression systems and monitoring 7x24x365 for HVAC and mission-critical power systems. All datacenter power is conditioned and fail-safe, with automatic power transfer bridge systems. The datacenters employ backup generators. Additionally the datacenters have the following attributes:
- Network and Telecommunications Equipment - All network and telecommunications equipment are redundant, and all servers have at least two network interfaces.
- Internet connectivity - Bullhorn’s primary lines are provisioned by a Tier 1 provider with two separate access points to the Web. Additionally, each datacenter has a second line with a different Tier 1 provider. Together, these two lines load-balance the Internet traffic traveling to and from the Bullhorn platform. In the unlikely even either line fails, the other is capable of handling Bullhorn’s full workload.
Multi-Datacenter Architecture
Bullhorn provides state of the art disaster recovery processes and systems that meet or exceed industry standard benchmarks. Data will be replicated between two geographically dispersed datacenters (currently, one in the United States and one in the United Kingdom). In the unlikely event that the production datacenter no longer functions as designed, Bullhorn will implement failover in accordance with the Business Continuity Plan.
Testing and Monitoring
Bullhorn’s Business Technology Operations (BTO) team of dedicated engineers continuously monitors and tests datacenter replication every six months to ensure systems are working as designed.
Disaster Recovery Capabilities and Process
Bullhorn, in alignment with other cloud vendors, does not have an official definition of a disaster beyond an event that forces a datacenter to no longer function as designed. Disaster declaration and initiation of failover to the other production datacenter is at the discretion of Bullhorn’s BTO team.
In the unlikely event of a disaster, Bullhorn will immediately initiate all relevant business continuity planning activities to ensure that Bullhorn can meet/exceed the published Recovery Time Objective and Recovery Point Objective metrics:
- Recovery Time Objective is the duration of service disruption after a disaster. Bullhorn’s Recovery Time Objective is 12 hours.
- Recovery Point Objective is the point at which data is recovered. Bullhorn’s Recovery Point Objective is 4 hours.
In accordance with Bullhorn’s Business Continuity Plan, BTO or a support representative will notify all account and support contacts for each affected customer, with Enterprise customers receiving prioritized service. Specific procedures will differ from customer-to-customer depending upon which Bullhorn services they use.
If a disaster renders the production datacenter no longer operational, the BTO team will enable the disaster recovery datacenter. In the event of such an extreme disaster that the datacenter facilities or hardware need to be completely replaced, Bullhorn will work as quickly as possible to ensure a functional datacenter is online, and that failback is the best plan of action.
In short, customers that have access to Bullhorn’s disaster recovery capabilities have the benefit of a backup site that provides all of the services currently available in production.