High Availability (HA)

When protecting mission critical systems from a disaster, and your recovery time objective (RTO) is near zero, a High Availability (HA) systems infrastructure ensures continuous operation and availability of your business systems. Cover-All can meet your RTO requirements by setting up a mirrored hardware environment at two separate Data Centres, which will ensure your immediate recovery from a disaster. Mirroring is the replication of data between a production environment and a secondary system. Replication software and a data circuit to support the replication is required as part of this solution.

Warm Site

Some of your business processes are not mission critical but may have a Recovery Time Objective (RTO) greater than zero. In these cases you may opt for a warm site backup solution. Warm site solutions require that dedicated hardware be located at a second Data Centre. This hardware can be a mirror image or a subset of the production environment depending on your business requirements. There is no data residing at the warm site. The servers and storage systems will always be running and ready to restore data and applications. When a disaster is declared data tapes are recalled and delivered to the warm site where they are restored.

Cold Site or Subscription DR

Cold Site DR allows clients to subscribe to a shared pool of resources including servers, storage, tape drives, etc. through a DR Subscription Provider. These Providers typically host their DR solution at one or more of the Data Centres. Cold site subscribers most often have a 24-hour Recovery Time Objective (RTO), and usually restore their environment from tape. The subscription model is usually based on a first-come-first-served basis. DR Subscription Providers typically charge for tests, which usually occur once per year. In the event of a disaster declaration there is also a disaster declaration charge.

Backup as a Service (BaaS):

BaaS is designed to allow clients to back up their data to a secondary location.  Usually a secure Data Centre. Access to the data is through secure VPN connection.  Depending on your backup requirements the data could be restored to servers either at the same location or at a location of your choice.  This approach requires VPN access to the secondary location and to the location of your spare servers.

It’s important to note that BaaS is different than DRaaS. To find out more about each of these solutions please contact us.