Key Planning Points
As with strategizing for most essential IT capabilities, with DR it is critically
important to define your business needs before selecting a vendor and/or
designing a solution. Here are some important aspects to consider when plan-
ning a solution.
1. Determine your RTO and RPO. Among key criteria, these are by far the
most critical. No considerations will have more impact on your design
(and its cost!). For example, hot standby solutions can be 5x the cost of
cold recovery options, or even more. Because the cost of implementation
of different RTO/RPO scenarios is frequently a factor in deciding the
exact RTO/RPO standard, there is often a need for an iterative process
to arrive at the exact requirements and architecture.
2. Application data state is extremely important. Understanding the data
sources for an application, including read/write patterns and any data
synchronization requirements, is a fundamental requirement for a suc-
cessful DR implementation. The fact is, cookie cutter designs which do
not take application data state into account are highly unlikely to suc-
ceed, so be sure to confirm that application data state is clearly under-
stood and built into backup and DR architectures.
3. Cloud-based backup or DR designs for on-premise architectures, while
using principles similar to cloud-native environments, will have signifi-
cantly different implementation architectures. This is because of
latency issues, ingress and egress bandwidth, transfer costs and possibly
differing data security requirements between on-prem and cloud. Be
sure to anticipate these potential differences and make sure they are
considered during architecture design and selection.
Optimal data backup, restore and disaster recovery designs require signifi-
cantly more effort and detail than what is described in this short article. How-
ever, keeping in mind these basic definitions and principles will go a long way
toward ensuring you start your planning with critically important concepts,
and end up with solutions that are cost-effective, performant and truly aligned
with your business requirements.
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