The Data Center: Using the Three P's of Disaster Recovery to Protect Your Data

By John Rath

July 1, 2008 —  (Page 1 of 3)

An EF5 tornado recently came within 25 miles of where I live. It was a major, historic event in the state and did some severe damage to small towns in its path. The sobering event made me think about two absolutely fundamental elements of a data center strategy—Disaster Recovery (DR) and Business Continuity Planning (BCP).

While these are really business elements, they are often thought of and managed by the IT department. The company, however, needs to drive recovery strategies for both the business and technology. Depending on the size and budget of the company, there are many options and levels of protection and planning that can be provided.

DR is essentially the three P’s of getting back in business—policy, process and procedures. It involves every facet of the business and requires a lot of planning. The data center and facilities portion of the DR plan involves many things. Whether you look at it as tiers of data availability, or a cold site, warm site or hot site decision, it comes down to deciding how to best match a data center facility or facilities with your policies and plan.

A cold site is the cheapest route to go . It is a standby site that contains no equipment, but has the right electrical, environmental and telecommunication accommodations. A warm site contains all of your equipment and is ready to go live, but does not have live data and would require a brief setup period. A hot site is fully equipped and ready to take over operations at a moment’s notice, and often has frequently backed up or continuously replicated data.

If more than one disaster recovery site is feasible for your company and budget, a strategy could be to have a secondary data center within the same general region of the country as the primary, and then have a tertiary facility in a completely opposite or distant region of the country or the world. It may be more economically feasible to outsource the disaster recovery site to a co-location provider and configure the leased space to be cold, warm or hot.

Related Search Term(s): Backup & recovery, data centers

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