FAQ about the B2C Commerce platform's Disaster Recovery (DR) procedure in case of an outage

Salesforce Commerce Cloud reserves the right to modify disaster recovery plans as necessary to meet the evolving needs of our business and customers.
 
Question: In case of a Disaster Recovery (DR) event, will the secondary POD be newly constructed or does it already exist?
 
Answer: A pre-defined secondary POD is located in a geographically separate data center. Although customers are fully responsible for backing up their data, B2C Commerce replicates customer production realm data to this secondary POD every 30 minutes to substantially reduce downtime in the event of a disaster. This secondary POD is a mirror of its primary POD and while located in the same geographical region as the primary POD, it is located in another data center. This means that it can be made fully operational when the need arises. Customers may discuss regional preferences for their data centers with their implementation team.

For the locations of Commerce Cloud B2C PODs, please see the articles below:

• Locations and Outgoing POD IPs for each Commerce Cloud POD [AMER PODs]
• Locations and Outgoing POD IPs for each Commerce Cloud POD [EMEA/APAC PODs]

 
Question: Is it necessary to update DNS and if so, who is responsible?
 
Answer:  There is no need to update DNS if it is set up to point to the eCDN zone's CNAME. However, customers are responsible for making sure that the secondary POD's IP address is allowlisted at your third party service. The recovery of any customer’s externally integrated services such as DNS and fulfilment systems are NOT included in the B2C Commerce disaster recovery plan. It is the customer’s responsibility to ensure the operation of these integrated systems with the secondary POD.
 
Question: What external integrations would not work and what is the process to get them up and running on the secondary POD?
 
Answer:  Each customer should know which external integrations they use, and notify them about the move to the secondary POD. Recovery of any customer implemented external service is not included in B2C Commerce's disaster recovery plans or processes. It is the customer's responsibility to determine the method of recovery for these integration points.

Question: How long does it take until the DR POD is up and working?
 
Answer: As disasters are typically complex events with compounding factors, a particular recovery period is difficult to predict and therefore B2C Commerce makes no representation that recovery is possible in a set period of time. However, in most cases we would expect recovery within 24 hours and target recovery of 8 hours.

Question: What testing is performed for B2C Commerce before releasing the secondary POD's realm to the client?
 
Answer: We test the availability of the B2C Commerce platform's service to the Production instance on the DR POD for all customers. Customers are responsible to test their respective custom solution; including site functionality and their unique external integrations/services. We work with all customers to verify and resolve any latent networking connectivity issues (if any) specific to the DR POD. 

Question: What is the usual time between identifying a DR event and releasing the secondary POD for the client after testing has been done?
 
Answer: A DR event is downtime without any known and reasonable recovery time.  This determination is somewhat subjective.  For example, we may know within a very short period of time (i.e. < 1 hour) that a POD will not be recoverable for a very long time (i.e. power/network at DC was physically cut inadvertently by construction, etc.) and we will commence DR procedures immediately. However, we will also wait a period of time (several hours) if the issues is known and reasonable recovery time in known; i.e. if the time to recover is shorter than the time to move all realms on the impacted POD to their respective DR locations.
 
Question:  Does storefront data e.g. catalogs get transferred by B2C Commerce to the secondary POD? If not, how does this process work?
 
Answer:  Yes, this information is carried over as part of the database and file system replication processes that we use.
 
Question:  Where can I find more information about what data is being backed up regularly by B2C Commerce? What data is being backed up that cannot be backed up via Business Manager? Also, how long is it being kept by the platform and is there any way to control this?
 
Answer: It is the customer's responsibility to back up data. To do so, please follow the steps in Scheduling Instance Backups.
 
B2C Commerce utilizes secondary facilities that are geographically remote from a customer’s primary data center location, along with required hardware, software, and equipment, in the event that production facilities hosting the customer’s primary data center were to be rendered unavailable. Recovery of any customer implemented external service is not included in B2C Commerce's disaster recovery plans or processes. It is the customer's responsibility to determine the method of recovery for these integration points.