RMS
ERCOT Disaster Recovery Workshop Follow-up
ERCOT
September 9, 2014
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Disaster Recovery Workshop ERCOT Follow-ups
• Requirement: reduce the timeline from "event" to first notice
giving "market awareness" to an ERCOT system issue. What can
ERCOT do to meet this requirement?
• Work with COPS/CSWG on evaluating where COPMG may need
similar communication requirements as RMS
• Can MarkeTrak operate “standalone” without ERCOT’s
registration system?
– MarkeTrak functionality is largely “standalone” at this time
– A change request has been submitted to include all functionality
• What does it take to meet 12 hour recovery time objective? (event
to systems ready)
• What does it take to meet 6 hour recovery time objective? (event
to systems ready)
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Retail/Commercial Systems – DR Capability
• Capable of operating out of two data centers
• Capable of a 5 minute data loss Recovery Point Objective (RPO)
• Recovery Time Objective (RTO)
– Moving ERCOT’s operations between data centers
– ERCOT has historically committed to a 24 hour RTO of all
Retail/Commercial systems
– After a review of the current DR plan and processes, ERCOT will
commit to a 12 hour RTO
• Assumptions:
– ERCOT’s alternate, or passive, data center is fully functional
– The 12 hour RTO window starts with ERCOT’s first detection of an
issue or incident that may require moving to the alternate data
center
• ERCOT may execute 1 planned site failover in the fall/winter of
2014
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Retail/Commercial Systems – DR Capability
• Recovery Priority
- Retail Services will normally be restored, or failed over, in a
parallel fashion
- Should prioritization be necessary, the following order will be
followed
Retail Service
Priority
RTO
Retail Transaction Processing
1
12 hours
Disputes & Issues
2
12 hours
Data Access & Transparency (reports/extracts)
3
12 hours
Data Access & Transparency / Ad-Hoc Requests
3
12 hours
Flight Testing
4
Best effort (no redundant
environment)
4
Retail/Commercial Systems – DR Capability
• 6 hour RTO would require additional costs
– ERCOT would need to undertake a formal initiative to determine the
scope of necessary changes/costs
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