Why cross cell data centers are not a best practice for disaster recovery

This topic has been coming up time and time again. It is time that people read about the trade offs when trying to conduct DR with a single cell across multiple data centers. Yes, this might work. But more often than not the various interconnects between the two data centers and the interaction can lead to very negative consequences that disables the intended DR effort.

Do the right thing. Isolate the two data centers with separate cells. You'll find this works not only much better but has a very high success rate if done correctly (i.e. you use scripting to build your environments therefore having repeatable processes across DCs).

Comment lines: Tom Alcott: Everything you always wanted to know about WebSphere Application Server but were afraid to ask -- Part 3

While the notion of a single cell across data centers is bad from a risk aversion perspective, running a cluster across two data centers not only requires you to forget about minimizing risk, as noted above (since a cluster cannot span cells), but further increases risk along multiple dimensions.