If you’re building out a disaster recovery site, there are many options available to you. In this video, you’ll learn about cold sites, warm sites, and hot sites.
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If you’re building out a disaster recovery site, there are many different options available. In this video, we’ll talk about cold sites, warm sites, and hot disaster recovery sites. A cold disaster recovery site is a site where you’re simply provided an empty building and there’s no hardware at all available to you. You will need to bring your hardware with you, you will need to bring your data, and you will need to bring your people. This is a very bare bones recovery site, but it allows you to customize exactly the type of recovery site you’d like.
A warm disaster recovery site is one step up, where you get just enough to get things going. You might get a large room with rack space and you bring the hardware. Or there may be hardware ready and waiting for you, but it’s up to you to bring the operating systems and to load the data. A hot site is one that is an exact duplicate of your existing production system. Everything is duplicated with exactly the same hardware and exactly the same software.
The implementation of a hot site is usually something that’s integrated into your normal purchasing processes. If you’re going to buy a server, then naturally, you’re going to automatically buy a duplicate of that server to put in the hot site. It’s common to have all of the data in the hot site constantly updated, so there will be a duplicate production and an automated replication that’s occurring constantly during the business day. The idea of a hot site is you should be able to flip a switch, or a series of switches, and move the entire production environment to your hot disaster recovery site.