Choosing a disaster recovery center – geographic diversity

So you finally have budget approval for your IT disaster recovery project.  How do you choose a disaster recovery center?

SearchDataCenter’s Russell Olsen published an article on geographic diversity that sheds light on the question “how far is far enough” when it comes to your disaster recovery colocation or data center.

Choosing a data recovery site is difficult because there are no clear standards in this area. The closest we get to a standard is a white paper released by the Federal Reserve in response to Sept. 11.

Early versions of this white paper discussed minimum distances of approximately 200 miles, but were sharply criticized for being technically impossible for some systems due to latency and the replication demands. The paper settled on “an appropriate level of geographic diversity between primary and backup sites for back-office operations and data centers.” That’s not a lot of help for those of us who have been tasked with this responsibility.

SearchDataCenter article

Alex Carroll

Managing Member at Lifeline Data Centers

Alex, co-owner, is responsible for all real estate, construction and mission critical facilities: hardened buildings, power systems, cooling systems, fire suppression, and environmentals. Alex also manages relationships with the telecommunications providers and has an extensive background in IT infrastructure support, database administration and software design and development. Alex architected Lifeline’s proprietary GRCA system and is hands-on every day in the data center.