IT systems are essential for the operations of any modern business. Such systems must support operations of their corresponding company under any conditions. Disaster Recovery (DR) strategies have been implemented to help organizations mitigate unexpected failures and reduce unnecessary expenses. However, to the best of our knowledge, no other work experimentally analyzes data replication at the database layer with a focus on DR strategies. Therefore, this work evaluates a relational database replication as a mean of implementing a DR solution. We use a real testbed in a public cloud environment to perform extensive experiments aimed at implementing the replication provided by MySQL, considering various scenarios in the context of DR. Our results show how response time, Recovery Point Objective (RPO) and Recovery Time Objective (RTO) vary according to the size of the replicated data, the synchronization type (ex.: asynchronous or semisynchronous) and the configuration of the slave servers. This work can assist DR coordinators or individuals to decide which database replication configuration for disaster recovery is best for their work environment.
