One of the most critical points in a business is to repair itself quickly and start operating after a disaster.
After an accident, you may need to back up your data, but switching to a backup solution is more complicated than switching. Sometimes we need to transfer data, but depending on the backup frequency, they may not be up to date, and problems may arise.
Recovery data is made available to companies in cold, warm, and hot weather to solve such problems.
These approaches make it possible to back up, but they are different and apply in different situations. Join us to get acquainted with the hot, cold, and hot sites and understand their differences.
You will also find out what kind of company each site is suitable for.
Risk and Disaster Management Program in Data Centers
- These days, systems play an essential role in various businesses’ success, and any problem for them can cause massive and sometimes irreparable damage to businesses. Unfortunately, even just one hour of downtime can cause enormous damage to companies and make it difficult for them to continue operating.
- Various disasters, including natural disasters, terrorist attacks, cyber-attacks, etc., can occur, causing systems to be destroyed and vital corporate information to be lost. For this reason, company managers must consider measures to prevent such accidents, through which they can continue their activities quickly and without damaging their income and business.
- In other words, the continuity of businesses depends on the disaster recovery plan. If corporate executives use such a program, it is possible to ensure that they continue to operate in crisis times.
It is necessary to provide a more precise definition of a disaster recovery plan to realize its great importance.
Types of the configuration of design structures:
Disaster recovery planning is one of the most critical and challenging issues in data center design and disaster recovery site design. Disaster recovery planning is essential to migrating and transferring risks and reducing vulnerability. Types of configurations of design implementations in the data center are described in three classes.
Cold Standby:
A cold site is the cheapest solution in which companies, after the problem, start transferring data and information of their users to the backup location and are engaged in preparing and configuring the necessary hardware and practically recovering after that begins. Therefore, there will be a significant time interval between viewing the problem and retrieving it.
In this option, there are one or more data centers that are correctly configured. The existing space is pre-determined and adequately equipped with environmental, electrical, and communication conditions. Hardware and software installations, network access, and data retrieval all require manual intervention. This option has the lowest cost in terms of implementation and maintenance and has an inherent delay from standby to full-performance mode.
Cool sites do not create a complete instant copy but require personal equipment, provided by customers, and managed in a relaxed environment. Therefore, to perform online services on this site, more speed is needed. Organizations that receive alerts quickly can use their cold site speedily and before a crisis occurs to prevent harm to the company and its operations.
Cold sites, like hot sites, support and restore infrastructure support and recovery space, but do not create an instant copy.
A cool site costs much less than hot spots because it requires much less equipment and does not require managed services. But it has less protection and safety against damage.
Warm Standby:
A cool site already has the equipment to use all of those services but needs preparation time to go online. Therefore, it takes less time to retrieve information than the cold site, and the operation will be longer.
In the hot site, hardware preparation has been done by what can at least have the least definite time in the event of a problem with user data transfer. But the site may be much smaller than the company’s current data center.
In this configuration, the primary data center is active, and the secondary data center is ready to use, and user requests are served only in the primary data center. In the event of a catastrophe or failure of the primary data center, the standby data center will help the users’ requests. Simultaneously, the necessary operations for disaster recovery for the primary data center will be performed. In this option, the latest copy of the data is delivered from the generated data center.
Hot Standby:
In a hot site, there is practically a Mirror of your data center in another location, which at the time of the problem either coincides entirely with the current data center or with the transfer of brief information that includes the latest update of user data; it can be Synchronized. Of course, this method will be costly; But if the company requires a high uptime, it is necessary to use this site.
In this configuration, both the primary data center and the secondary data center are active and serve user requests. In the event of a disaster, the secondary data center responds to rights at the same time. Risk management operations for the primary data center also begin.
The redundancy of data centers through this configuration can be ignored due to the proper use of resources and management ease.
This method is more suitable for RPO and RTO than the previous way, but it costs more to implement.
Disadvantages include complexity in sample biphasic development, data redundancy in both directions, and management of both active data centers.
A hot site is always available, and all company information is stored and maintained quickly. Hot spots need to be continuously managed and monitored. Hotspots are temporary operations bases that become areas of urinary work until the company returns to normal in the event of a disaster.
A hot site’s advantage is that it can be used immediately after creating a problem on the leading site. It significantly eliminates the issues caused by the failure of the central system. Of course, using these sites is very expensive.
The right choice for business continuity
One of the most critical needs of companies is to withstand the conditions and manage them in urgent situations and create various problems or accidents. In many industries, the shortest downtime of a site can also cause a lot of financial loss.
Therefore, it is very convenient to use hot, cold, warm, and hot sites, which are selected depending on each company’s conditions.
Organizations that can handle some of their downtime and services without causing severe problems can take advantage of the cold site solution, but companies for which fast site performance is a critical turn to hot sites.
And companies that tolerate a little time in site downtime also use the hot site.
