When it comes to choosing the disaster recovery site for your business, one size (or distance) does not fit all. There are several factors you must consider regarding your business’s unique risks to ensure that your DR site is appropriate and offers the protection you require.
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Environmental Impact – Consider seismic zones, flood plains, hurricane paths, and other regional factors. Will a DR site 50 miles away remove (or greatly reduce) the risk of one disaster impacting both locations? Choosing a DR site 100 miles away, but also within the Gulf of Mexico impact zone or along the same fault line may not prevent an outage should a natural disaster occur.
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Latency – Though you must ensure that there is redundancy in connectivity, a dark fiber connection between your primary and DR site is preferred. You don’t want to have such excessive distance between your DR and primary sites that you have latency issues. For example, Data Canopy provides its DR clients with fiber links between its major data centers typically supported by two discreet paths.
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Metropolitan Area – In general it is recommended that you choose a DR site outside of your immediate metropolitan area. By doing so, you avoid the impact of widespread power outages, pandemic diseases, civil disorder, fiber outages, etc, that are regionally based. Take your recovery time objective and whether you plan on using remote hands or having staff on site when making your determination of how far is too far away from the immediate metropolitan area.
In general, a 75-100 mile distance is recommended as a good starting point for determining the right distance for your DR solution. If your primary data center is in Sterling, VA, is a great place to start. If your primary facility is in Chicago, IL, consider Phoenix, AZ, or Houston, TX. If you have questions, please do not hesitate to contact us. We’re happy to help you with your DR planning.
Don’t Let your business become a statistic.
