As more information systems are used in companies, disaster recovery becomes more and more important. You can refer to the 7 tiers of disaster recovery in this post to decide which level you need and how to protect your workloads.
Updated by Nick Zhao on 2024/11/04
The involvement of information technology has facilitated companies in improving production and management. While embracing the bloom of the most advanced technology, data protection should never be ignored. After all, data is the foundation of a company’s assessment and the consequences of losing data without a backup could be catastrophic.
Data protection includes strategies and technologies which involves from simple data backup to disaster recovery. It reflects that people see from the single aspect of data recovery to the whole business recovery.
When a company compile its disaster recovery plan, IT administrators will consider the goals of disaster recovery and then provide some suggestions. Referring to the tiers of disaster recovery will help select corresponding solutions and building the necessary facilities.
Disaster recovery is the process of recovering workloads from disaster. Compared with simple data backup, more aspects are considered during the process especially RPO and RTO.
Backup is one part of disaster recovery plan and IT administrators can use it to recover data but when talking about disaster recovery plan, companies will consider how long the recovery will take and how much data could be recovered in the event of data disasters like outages, human errors, cyberattacks, and natural disasters. These are known as RPO and RTO.
RPO and RTO requirements can vary between companies depending on the importance of workloads and budget investment . Some companies will require zero RPO and RPO but for some companies, losing some data or recovering workloads after hours could be accepted.
Disaster recovery is not a new concept. The experts have summarized the levels of disaster recovery to help companies decide where they should go.
This is the lowest disaster recovery tier. Companies at this level often have just slight disaster recovery requirement and simply copy data to local drives so the whole recovery process is executed on site.
Companies at this level start to have good awareness of disaster recovery. No matter where the backup data is stored, there is always the risk of data lose due to various causes so having a copy of backup in the remote site could mitigate the impact of local data loss. Therefore, companies start to have resilience against local disaster.
Except for maintaining a copy of backup in the remote site. Companies could also deploy simple infrastructure in the remote site to reboot workloads in case of a disaster in the local site.
This includes deploying some hardware similar to what is used in the local site. The amount of hardware could be less than that in the local site to support just critical workloads at the beginning. Large enterprises will deploy an identical environment in the remote site to have the ability to completely take over local workloads after a disaster.
In tier 1 and 2, backups are sent to the secondary site physically. This will cause difficulties during both sending and retrieving data, especially when it is needed to use the backup data in the local site.
Tier 3 disaster recovery requires the backup data to be transmitted online between the local site and secondary sites. That’s also the result of the development of network capability which could support the transmission of large amounts of data.
With the network connection built between the two site, sending and retrieving data become much more convenient.
This tire of disaster recovery requires the primary and secondary sites to backup each other, by regularly transmitting important data. This will facilitate a fast recovery speed because all the needed hardware and software are readily available.
Companies at the level of disaster recovery have data validity requirements for certain software. Still, two sites should be deployed. Additionally, this tire requires partial or complete dedicated hardware at the remote site to store important data in image format and execute a two-phase commit. Important data in the remote site and the primary site is updated or backed up as a single unit of work.
At this level of disaster recovery, companies still deploy the backup system and the production system in two sites and both of them has the same ability to process production data and is completely compatible with each other. Both site continuously transmits data to each other and the backup system should have the ability to monitor and automatically switch the remote cluster systems.
This is the highest level of disaster recovery. Companies deploy complete same infrastructure in the two sites as in tier 6 and additional automation tools to monitor and switch business systems when they are down.
Vinchin Backup & Recovery is a backup and disaster recovery for all kinds of companies. It supports backing up various workloads like virtual machines, physical servers, databases, file servers, etc. and provides robust disaster recovery feature for critical workloads.
Offsite Backup: When you need to store the local backup to another location, it allows you to create a task to automatically copy the backup data to remote data center or public cloud like AWS and Azure, providing another layer of protection to data.
Instant Restore: Virtual machines now are often used to run business systems and Vinchin allows you to restart a failed virtual machine from its backup in 15 seconds, greatly shortening RTO.
Continuous Data Protection: For the critical workloads, you can use CDP feature to continuously backing up data and replicating the data to another machine for automatic failover.
Vinchin Backup & Recovery has helped thousands of companies protect and recover data and you can start a 60-day full-featured of free trial to see how brilliant it is. Its uer-friendly web console will help you easily implement your disaster recovery solution. Just click the button to get the installation package.
1. Which tiers of disaster recovery is suitable for your business?
It depends on your business size, industry regulations, accepted RTO and RPO, etc. and it is suggested to have multiple backup copies stored in offsite storage to avoid data loss.
2. What is the cost difference between each other?
Generally speaking, the higher the tier is, the more budgets it will cost. You should select the proper solutions based on the disaster recovery purpose and budget.
3. Can you upgrade from a lower tier to a higher tier of disaster recovery?
You can select a professional disaster recovery solution like Vinchin which supports establishing multiple tiers of disaster recovery so you can easily upgrade protection to your workloads at any time.
As companies business systems grow and become more and more important, companies should have a disaster recovery plan to ensure business continuity. To create a proper plan, you can refer to the 7 tiers of disaster recovery to see where you are and how to implement disaster recovery solution.
Vinchin Backup & Recovery is an excellent disaster and recovery solution for companies and it offers robust features to let you easily protect critical workloads. Don’t miss the free trial.
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