Businesses that own and operate an onsite data center typically do so at their own risk. If your enterprise does not have a data center redundancy plan in place, how can your business rapidly recover from a disaster recovery (DR) scenario?
Don’t let a disaster catch your organization off guard.
All IT professionals will agree that it is a best practice to regularly backup your data. For enterprises that thrive on uptime, file level backups of your data may not be enough. Organizations must weigh the costs associated with the downtime that is incurred when IT staff is restoring the data during a DR event.
Additionally, businesses that operate an onsite data center will be tasked with acquiring new data center infrastructure. The IT staff must also find a new location for the infrastructure, properly configure the infrastructure while providing power, network and cooling once it is all in place.
Organizations must consider the worst possible scenarios that could prevent them from quickly recovering from a disaster. Enterprises must test and implement creative strategies that could be used to ensure maximum redundancy.
Could your business stay online during a disaster? Let’s examine the most common DR scenarios and look more closely at how businesses are using colocation hosting providers such as ColoCrossing to solve data center redundancy issues.
Consider the Most Common Disaster Recovery Scenarios
More often than not, IT professionals find themselves dealing with weather related DR events than they do any other type of DR scenario.
In fact, many insurance companies refer to weather related disaster recovery scenarios as “Acts of God.” Organizations must prepare for the environmental realities of their specific locality and concoct a plan that will maximize uptime during a period of possible interruptions.
If your onsite data center resides in an area that is prone to one of the following:
- Earthquakes
- Hurricanes
- Flooding
- Tornadoes
- Severe Thunderstorms
- Severe Winter Weather
Your organization may be at risk for incurring downtime that could be costly to your bottom line. Organizations must consider the fact that other businesses will begin operating in disaster recovery mode during a widespread event that impacts your region.
This means that suppliers of data center infrastructure could become backlogged with urgent orders, which could quickly deplete their inventories and cause shipping delays. Enterprises may not have the opportunity to quickly rebuild their infrastructure onsite, leaving the organization vulnerable to costly downtime.
Create High Availability Infrastructure Using ColoCrossing
One of the key principles of backing up your data is to have a copy of your data in a secured location that is over 100 miles away from your corporate office.
Experts in the data backup field suggest that your business should always retain a copy of its data in a secured location that may not have been heavily impacted by the regional disaster. This increases your chances of having a successful recovery.
The wrench in this plan is that infrastructure, bandwidth and even power can become a rare commodity during a disaster recovery scenario. One of the best ways to mitigate against the risks of disaster related downtime is to extend your infrastructure using a colocation hosting provider.
With ColoCrossing, you can choose to build your disaster recovery infrastructure in one of our 9 data centers located all across the United States.
When you use a colocation hosting provider such as ColoCrossing, your business gains an edge because it can simultaneously store its backups in a secured environment while also having instant access to highly redundant infrastructure that carries a 100% network uptime guarantee.
Start Planning for Data Center Redundancy during Disaster Recovery
Every disaster recovery plan must be custom tailored to the core needs of your business. One common method of ensuring maximum uptime involves system administrators configuring their hypervisors for high availability. 
For example, your enterprise could host your production virtual machines in a hypervisor inside your onsite data center. Your administrator could configure VMware ESXi in conjunction with VMware vCenter for high availability.
In this scenario, you could set it up to where data that resides on a VMware datastore is replicated to your infrastructure that resides in a colocated data center. If vCenter notices that your onsite ESXi host fails, it’s possible to configure these hosts for high availability to instantly shift those workloads onto your hypervisor that is setup inside the colocated data center.
This is a high level overview of one potential failover scenario that you could use in conjunction with ColoCrossing’s network of award winning data centers. With ColoCrossing, your enterprise will benefit from our dedication to uptime. If your business lacks a disaster recovery plan, contact us today for a free, no obligation consultation with a disaster recovery specialist.
