Disaster recovery is one of the scariest words in the IT world.
Did you know that 40% of IT professionals believe that their small business would permanently go out of business should they encounter a total loss of their data.
While disaster recovery is something that you will never want to go through in your career, the ugly truth is that your enterprise will encounter some sort of event in which data will need to be retrieved from backups. It’s almost inevitable.
Using Colocated Servers as a Backup Plan
Consider the following scenario:
Your organization has excess hardware that it would like to put to use. One of the best ways to ensure maximum uptime to send this hardware to a colocated datacenter and purpose this hardware as a dedicated backup infrastructure.
You may already have a colocated server workload for your organization and you may simply have extra space on your rack. If that’s the case, put your extra infrastructure to work for your business.
Colocated vs. Cloud for Backups?
Every organization is different. Some businesses believe that they must be in complete control of their corporate data. When you give your data to a cloud backup organization, you put your entire data backup infrastructure in the hands of another entity.
What if your business finds itself needing a data backup retrieval. However, for some reason, the data backup the requires help of the cloud service provider. What if you need the help immediately? Can you count on your cloud provider to be there for the moment you need them the most?
By building your data backup infrastructure in a colocated datacenter, you can be sure that your organization has a warm standby server that is available for failover incase something bad happens to your network.
You can also setup file level recovery and rapidly move the data back to your production servers, should you need to restore data that is missing from your servers.
One of the things that businesses must realize is that when they use a cloud data syncing service, they are at the mercy of the bandwidth available between the cloud backup provider and your onsite infrastructure.
If your infrastructure is already setup in a data center colocation scenario, you could colocate your workload in the same datacenter or in a nearby datacenter that is within the family of your colo provider. This type of setup could provide your network with fault tolerance.
Using the colocated infrastructure backup scenario, you can rapidly recover your data since the data won’t have to travel as far to reach your production environment. This can be advantageous for businesses who wish to be one step ahead of any potential problems that could arise from putting your data backup infrastructure in the hands of a 3rd party solution.
