Preparing for the worst
Disaster Recovery (DR) is the concept of preparing for the unexpected so that in the event of a disaster, your business operations can continue as normal. A disaster can be any unforeseen event that could put your business at risk – such as a fire, hurricane, or even a malicious attack.
Having a DR plan in place is essential, but one of the most time-consuming decisions can be determining what type of recovery is most suitable for your business. Hyve can provide two types of DR – warm or hot. Warm DR involves failover to a secondary platform that needs to be booted up on-demand, whereas Hot DR involves automatic failover to a secondary mirror site.
Hot DR explained
Hyve provides Hot DR, helping businesses to continue to operate by replicating and failing over to a secondary certified and compliant DR site. Your entire system architecture, data storage and applications can be replicated and synchronised from virtual or physical environments to one of Hyve’s global DR data centres.
At Hyve, we set up continuous replication from our production site using SQL, Always On or MySQL Replication for the databases, and Robocopy for Windows server and R-Sync for Linux file servers. We also have a basic localised backup recovery service which allows us to boot you directly from a backup in the case of a disaster – this is specifically within a single location.
In the unlikely event that there was a disaster at the production site, the DNS would failover to the Hot DR site, allowing you to continue to serve content to customers and staff as normal. This type of failover normally takes around 2 minutes to complete. Running a secondary site continuously is the best enterprise-level solution if your business needs robust replication and instant failover.
Is Hot DR right for my business?
Before deciding which type to choose, it is crucial to weigh up the DR costs with the price of downtime to your business, alongside your recovery time objective (RTO) and recovery point objective (RPO).
The point in a server’s timeline that a business could return to after a disaster is known as the Recovery Point Objective (RPO). Recovery Time Objective (RTO) refers to the maximum amount of downtime that a customer could tolerate before causing any harm to their business or day-to-day operations.
If your RTO is low, a Hot DR solution is advisable because systems are already set to your precise requirements and automatic failover means no downtime for mission-critical data. Businesses that perform real-time processes, such as eCommerce or financial companies, may have a need to comply with industry regulations and cannot afford any disruption to business as usual, so, therefore, will have a very low RTO.
This type of DR provides the most reliable service for businesses as the secondary site is continuously running, but is more suited to customers with larger budgets and rigorous compliance requirements. Whilst having a Hot DR site running concurrently with your primary site is more costly than a Warm DR solution, it is worth considering that these additional costs will pay off in providing redundancy if disaster strikes.
To find out more about Hyve’s Disaster Recovery services, get in touch with our sales team today on 0333 256 5633.
