Business Continuity and Storage Disaster Recovery Techniques

The simplest approach to disaster recovery is taking frequent backups and storing the backup media at a remote site. However, this method does not allow for fast recoveries, nor is the recovered data particularly up-to-date. Fast disaster recovery is based on maintaining a second disk-resident copy of data that is consistent to a point-in-time as close to the time of a failure as possible. This mirrored data can be used to restart systems and applications that rely on databases. Companies planning for disaster recovery should fully understand how their chosen replication technology works, what its limitations are, and how it will react in various disaster scenarios such as loss of network, physical site disaster, component failure, and application failure.