As I eluded to in earlier posts, $work (a large university) held our annual disaster recovery test last week. This involved recovering the following items at our “cold” site in Atlanta, GA: network, backup server, and various systems supporting payroll, registrar, alumni, and grant proposals. We are supposed to try to get everything up and running in 72 hours, and we normally come very close, on average between 72 and 80 hours.
Before I go any further, I should explain what a “cold” site is. There are three types of sites normally used for disaster recovery. A “cold” site, meaning nothing is on-site until we declare a disaster, except for the physical datacenter. A “warm” site, which has some hardware that is not in production use, but is running and remotely accessible. And a “hot” site, which contains production systems. Every company should be striving to have a hot site, more commonly known as Business Continuity in ITIL speak. In a hot site, if a production system fails, users have no idea the system that were using is gone an continue working like nothing happened. Continue reading
