02-25-21 | Blog Post
Disaster Recovery (DR) is among the most important strategic practices for any business today, but what happens when your colocation or DR provider resides in the actual disaster zone? When your disaster becomes a reality and the manual or automated practice of disaster recovery is initiated, will your provider be ready regardless of local conditions? Geographic diversity for colocation, DR, or cloud-based backup is also a very important consideration. The recent weather events provide an excellent rationale for power and distance being essential elements of the business continuity equation. So much of the USA was impacted by recent weather events that even multiple DR sites in a close proximity could have been impacted simultaneously.
N+1 Power Redundancy and Distance Preferred
To minimize the risk that this type of natural or criminal disruption will impact business, your Backup, DR, or colocation provider should offer more than just an SLA. True N+1 power redundancy should be a basic requirement. N+1 redundancy ensures that an uninterruptible supply of power is provided with the “+1” representing, specific in this example to the Otava Austin, Texas location, both multiple/diverse main power feeds, and local power backup via massive, dedicated Cummins diesel generators. Both of these elements help to assure protection against physical disruption. Now that the Texas weather and power situations have improved, it should be noted that no Otava location or customer outages were reported in Austin, Texas (nor any other Otava location) as a result of these recent events.
Otava recommends your business should use 300 miles as the minimum distance requirement for primary location to backup or disaster recovery location. Greater distances, for geo-diversity, can reduce risk even further. Should increased geo-distance between locations be desired, it is important to work with your provider to test that applications and data can be accessed with minimal latency.
Looking for help to assure your disaster recovery, backup, or colocation efforts are uninterrupted by the ever-increasing frequency of impactful events? Otava can help. Our experts can help you minimize risk by assuring your data, records and intellectual property are protected from power or physical disruption thereby helping to assure your business continuity and disaster recovery strategies. Contact us to learn more or download our Disaster Recovery white paper.
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