Introduction

With today's IT infrastructures, be it virtual or physical, disaster recovery is of prime importance. Any business should be able to continue operating with reduced downtime for its sustainability amongst the competition. It also has a legal obligation towards customers to whom it sold its services. Two of the major factors used to market or sell a service are its High Availability and Recoverability.

Recoverability is the guarantee that the service offered and its data are protected against failures, and High Availability is the guarantee that the service offered would remain operational and the failures are handled in a way that the user of the service would not even know that there was a failure.

There are many ways in which businesses plan and implement disaster recovery. Although important, much of these decisions depend on the budgetary constraints. What turns out to be the most important is the existence of a disaster recovery plan. Gone are those days when you had to wait for a long period of time before all your critical applications were made available at a recovery site. With a lot of automation and scripting, businesses now expect better Recovery Point Objective (RPO) and Recovery Time Objective (RTO).