Three Questions When Choosing a Backup Solution:

Three Questions When Choosing a Backup Solution:

1. What is your RTO?
2. What is your RPO?
3. What is your budget?

RTO - Recovery Time Objective -How Quickly Can Your Business Recover?

Your Recovery Time Objective (RTO) is the maximum amount of time your systems can be out of commission — from when a disruption occurs to the moment your system is available again. Another way to think of this is “how long can you afford to be without your email, accounting, order entry, etc.?”  We hear answers to this question ranging from “15 minutes would kill us” to, believe it or not, “If i was down for a week it wouldn’t really matter that much.”

Business Continuity. Businesses need to have continuity. When operations are disrupted by a server failure, companies need to recover quickly and return to normal operations as soon as possible. Recovering data, applications and system files over an internet connection sounds easy enough, but it can be a painfully slow process. Consider the download bandwidth of your own network connection, the size of your system, and think of how long it would take to restore everything currently stored on your server. Also consider that in the case of a disaster, internet transmission infrastructure may be damaged or missing. If there is no internet connectivity, off-site information will be unavailable no matter how well it is backed up. On-site storage would be better in such situations, but file-by-file recovery, even with on-site availability, is still a time-consuming process. Fortunately, a file-based disaster recovery solution isn’t the only option. On-site Tech Support uses a block-based method of information recovery. While file-based recovery is only possible so long as applications or systems are available to process the recovery, block-based methods typically image and store an entire disk. Rather than recover individual files, one at a time, recovery is accomplished by writing a disk image onto a new drive, which duplicates exactly the original information: data, applications and operating system. The speed of block-based disaster recovery methods makes them superior choices for business continuity.

RPO – Recovery Point Objective – How Much Data Can You Afford to Lose?

“How much data can you afford to lose?” is an over simplification.  RPO is a measure of the maximum time period in which data mightbe lost if there is a major incident affecting your systems –  not a direct measure of how much data might be lost.  The RPO is expressed backward in time from the instant at which the failure occurs, and can be specified in seconds, minutes, hours, or days.  Once the RPO has been defined, it determines the minimum frequency with which backups must be made. This, along with the Recovery Time Objective, determines the optimal disaster recovery technologies and procedures.

• If your backup runs once per day and is taken off-site once per week, your RPO is 1 week.  You could conceivably lose 1 weeks worth of data.
• If your backup runs once per day and is replicated offsite once per day, your RPO is 48 hours.  You could conceivably lose 48 hours worth of data.
• If your backup runs every 15 minutes and is replicated offsite throughout the day, your RPO is 15 minutes plus replication time which depends on your internet speed.  This could be as low as 20 minutes total up to several hours if you have a slow connection.

RTO and the RPO have a very significant effect on the design of your Backup and Disaster Recover Solution so must be considered in concert with all the other major system design criteria.

Budget – What Can You Afford?

How much money do you have available to protect your data and systems? This answer largely determines the degree to which you can implement an Adaptive Infrastructure.  You may do all the calculations for Recovery Time Objective nad Recovery Point Objective and sit back and smile and say “Do it!”.  And then you get the price tag.  The lower the RPO and RTO limits are, the higher the price.  You have to find a balance between your pain threshold and what you can afford.

We can help!

Call today for a Backup and Disaster Recovery evaluation and assessment.  Our engineers can help you with all of this.  For more information call 619-717-8070.