Authors: Hamid Ansari
Abstract: In today’s digital landscape, enterprise IT environments demand resilient and scalable disaster recovery (DR) solutions, especially in hybrid UNIX systems where Solaris, AIX, HP-UX, and Linux coexist. These systems often run critical workloads in sectors like finance, healthcare, telecommunications, and government, necessitating DR architectures that ensure high availability, data integrity, and business continuity across heterogeneous platforms. This review provides a comprehensive analysis of scalable DR architectures tailored for hybrid UNIX environments, addressing the complex interplay between storage replication, backup strategies, orchestration tools, and operating system-level recovery mechanisms. Key architectural patterns such as active-active and multi-site replication models are examined alongside file system-level and block-level replication technologies including ZFS send/receive, Veritas Volume Replicator, and SAN mirroring solutions. The paper compares OS-specific recovery tools like Ignite-UX, mksysb, and Solaris Unified Archives, and assesses their interoperability in multi-vendor environments. Further, the study explores the orchestration layer of disaster recovery, highlighting the role of configuration management and automation tools like Ansible, Puppet, and scripting frameworks. Monitoring, testing, and policy-driven recovery are addressed as essential pillars of a sustainable DR strategy. Real-world case studies are analyzed to illustrate practical implementations, performance outcomes, and lessons learned in deploying scalable DR across diverse UNIX infrastructures. Challenges such as format incompatibility, network reconfiguration, and security hardening are critically discussed. Finally, the review anticipates emerging trends, including the use of AI/ML for proactive fault prediction and the integration of DR into continuous compliance and observability pipelines. This article serves as a reference for system architects, disaster recovery planners, and enterprise IT professionals seeking to build resilient, automated, and cross-platform DR frameworks for UNIX-centric infrastructures.
DOI: http://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.15798539
