When a disaster strikes, you’ll need to establish a new base of operation. In this video, you’ll learn about cold sites, warm sites, and hot sites.
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Many organizations will use an external site for any disaster recovery requirements. In this video, we’ll look at the different types of recovery sites an organization might use. One type of site is a completely cold site. This means that it is effectively an empty building that might have racks but not much else. It’s effectively waiting for you to bring the equipment, the software, and all of your data. It also doesn’t have any people available to staff this building, so you’ll need to bring in your own people to get everything up and running.
A warm site might give you just enough to get going. You might have a big room with rack space and you bring the hardware, or there may be hardware already ready to go and you would only need to bring your software in your data. So you would bring all of your information in and load it onto existing systems to get up and running. You would still need to bring your own people and your own data, but at least you would have something to start with when recovering your systems.
A hot site is undoubtedly the more expensive of these options, because you have an exact replica of everything. There’s a duplication of servers, of software, and your data. So this would be completely stocked with an exact representation of your live systems. It would always be updated with the latest software and all of your latest data, and you would effectively be buying two of everything. When you buy it for your existing data center, you would also buy it for your hot site.
In many hot sites, there’s an automatic replication that occurs. So anytime the data center is updated, all of that information is instantly updated on the hot site. That means if you suddenly needed to send everybody over to the hot site, all of the data would be updated, all of your software would be at the latest version, and your customers would have no idea there was any type of change, because you were running everything on your hot site.