Disaster Recovery

disaster recovery

Disaster Recovery is a “science” of two key parameters:

RPO: Recovery Point Objective:

What is the oldest point in time a business can accept if it needed to recover data.

RTO: Recovery Time Objective:

What is the maximum amount of time taken, the business will accept to bring the ‘Services’ back online.

Around these two parameters, an infinite number of permutations arise:

  1. Should all applications have the same RPO and RTO
  2. For a given application:
    1. Do all users of that application require the same RPO and RTO
  3. What type of disasters is a business looking to avoid
    1. Disk Failure
    2. Server Failure
    3. Data Corruption – Virus attacks, or Applications writing ‘bad data’
    4. Site Failure
    5. Theft, Fire, Power Outage, Inability for staff to access the primary office

Each Disaster and it’s ensuing recovery scenario implies a different form of  ‘data movement’ and geographic placement of data, and these lead to the most expensive constraints within the ‘DR Equation”, being network costs:

  • Is data moving across LANS
  • Is data across high speed WAN’s

or

  • Is  data moving from branch offices across low speed ADSL lines

Across LAN’s, it is possible to shift ‘huge’ amounts of data and protect entire System volumes for purposes of bare-metal restore.

Across WAN’s, it might just be the application data that is moved – which then requires consideration to ensure  ‘System State and Operating Systems’ are placed at the DR site for Production start-up.

Then there is the critical ‘Cost Equation‘:

  • What technology will enable me to perform DR
  • What impact will this have on existing infrastructure and staffing requirements
  • and What is the cost of new technology and the ongoing ‘three’ year Total Cost of Ownership

CD-DataHouse has extensive experience in DR and can readily juggle the complex parameters and permutations that affect DR.

Our goal is to optimise and de-risk your implementation – meaning an implementation that has no or minimal requirement to upgrade expensive storage systems or WAN links.

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