Loading

What you need to know about disaster recovery - Wowrack Blog

June 21, 2018 - Kenneth Odem

What you need to know about disaster recovery

Data storage and availability is one of the most important components to virtually all businesses in this day and age.  From our websites, HR/payroll, general data repositories, databases and beyond – each data set may have a different level of importance to an organization in terms of availability, number of backup copies, need for geo-diverse data sets etc.

At Wowrack, we help customers day-in and day-out with assessing the importance of this data by analyzing lost revenue as a result of downtime, need for high availability, geodiversity, and also managing the switchover process in the event of downtime.

What is backup?

Backups are one that most are familiar with.  Backups are data that is copied to another environment, rather which be another disk, a cloud environment, or tape.  Backups are your cheapest insurance option, protecting you from theft (cloud backups are best for this), employee accidents, crashed hard drives and corrupt RAID’s.

What is disaster recovery?

While similar to backups, its very different in nature.  Disaster Recovery focuses on more of business analytics, where your data sets are assessed in terms of recovery time (RTO), recovery point (RPO), cost of downtime, and the recovery solution to fit the organizations goals.

Active-Active

A great follow up to disaster recovery is Active-Active vs. Active-Passive.  In an A/A scenario, upon a critical failure, downtime is counted in milliseconds to seconds.  In A/A, you typically have an exact replica of your primary production environment in a different data center (we have two POP’s in Seattle for this purpose, in addition to 8 other POP’s around the world).  In this case, synchronous replication is in play.

Active-Passive

Active-Passive is less complicated than A/A and less expensive than an A/A setup, however there is generally more downtime associated with this model and there is also the potential for data loss should a critical failure occur.  This option is generally the most cost effective choice and is easy to implement.  In this case, asynchronous replication is in play and downtime is usually as long as it normally takes to boot up a system.

What solutions is right for you?

Wowrack can help with the assessment of your infrastructure and help with determining what option is best suited for you in addition to what the most cost-effective and efficient way to deploy is.

Get your free consultation today!

Uncategorized

Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *