What is Disaster Recovery?
Disaster Recovery (DR) solutions enable businesses to continue normal operations in the event of a disaster, such as resuming access to data, hardware, servers and networking equipment etc.
In our previous blog, we discussed how important it is to have a DR strategy in place to safeguard your business. Simply having a backup of your data is not sufficient if your business has zero tolerance for downtime. A simple DR solution would enable failover within the same data centre to another server, whereas a full DR solution involves dual or multiple data centres with DNS failover between them.
Hot DR & DNS failover
Hyve provides Hot Disaster Recovery. Hyve’s DR replicates and synchronises the entire system architecture, data storage and applications to a secondary data centre.
In the event of a disaster, Hyve would activate a DNS failover system to swing your DNS to the DR Site, enabling you to continue to serve your content to staff and customers. With Hot DR the DR site is live, and this can be checked at any point to see if the system runs in the same way as it does in production. If there was a catastrophic meltdown at the production site, we would use DNS to failover to the Hot DR site, making it the production site. This type of failover normally takes around 2 minutes to complete.
Hyve also has 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.
<p>If there was a catastrophic meltdown at the production site, we would use DNS to failover to the Hot DR site, making it the production site. This type of failover normally takes around 2 minutes to complete.</p>
Continuous replication
Hyve runs continuous replication from production sites using a number of methods, to ensure that data is always available. We can provide SQL AlwaysOn and MySQL replication, as well as straight SAN to SAN replication by sending blocks of traffic between data centre sites. File systems are also generally replicated using R-Sync for Linux servers and Robocopy for Windows.
Recovery objectives
Recovery objectives help to estimate the time that it will take to get your business back up and running in the event of a disaster. A Recovery Point Objective (RPO) is the point in the server’s timeline that you can return to after a disaster. A Recovery Time Objective (RTO) is the amount of time that it takes to recover from a situation such as a full data centre disaster.
RTOs and RPOs help to set expectations about recovery times and minimise loss of revenue for the business.
Why Hyve’s DR?
Choosing DR solutions for your business comes down to the real cost of downtime and the value of your data.
Hyve has a lot of experience running DR solutions for clients across a range of industries, including Finance and the Public Sector. In the event of a disaster, our dedicated Technical Support Engineers would be available 24/7 to assist in failover and recovery, working with you until you achieve full system recovery.
If you would like to discuss Hyve’s Disaster Recovery solutions or would benefit from speaking to our team about your Disaster Recovery strategy, give us a call us on 0800 612 2524.
