While many new technologies claim to revolutionize the practice of disaster recovery (DR) for IT environments, few have significantly altered the economics and logistics of building and maintaining a secondary IT site. For most organizations, a secondary site housing server and storage infrastructure has remained the only recovery path for their business from a primary site disaster, failure or outage.
While it might seem preferable to avoid the expenditure of a secondary IT site altogether, what drives investment in DR infrastructures is a set of recovery time objectives (RTOs) and recovery point objectives (RPOs) that respectively determine the maximum allowable downtime and data loss an organization is willing to sustain. While certain organizations may require both of these objectives to be near zero (i.e. instant recovery, no data loss), other organizations may be able to withstand minutes or even hours of downtime. Understanding these objectives is one of the fundamental tenets for DR planning and investment.