Skip to main content

Warm Site


In disaster recovery, a warm site is a secondary data center that an organization can use to support non-essential business tasks if the primary data center becomes unavailable. In this context, the word "site" means "location."

A warm site should be located far enough away from an organization's primary data center that it is unlikely to be affected by the same disaster. To that end, a warm site should not be on the same power grid as the primary data center it supports.

In addition to warm sites, large enterprises may also use hot sites and cold sites for disaster recovery (DR). Hot sites are fully functional and can take over immediately should a disaster occur. In contrast, cold sites have important infrastructure components such as electricity, but no technology. In many enterprise-level disaster recovery plans, warm sites are designated as intermediary facilities between the organization's hot sites and cold sites.

Warm sites typically rely on backups for recovery and can take advantage of less-expensive shared storage. In the past, there was a huge difference between hot sites and warm sites because backups were limited to tape. As a result, warm site recoveries used to be measured in days.

Today, disk-based backups and cloud-based backups have narrowed the gap between warm sites and hot sites, and almost all disaster recovery service providers now offer an electronic vaulting option, which is essentially disk-based backup of production data over the network. RTOs and recovery point objectives (RPOs) of warm sites with electronic vaulting are typically less than a day, which is very close to the recovery times offered by hot sites but at a fraction of the cost.

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Black swan

A  black swan event  is an incident that occurs randomly and unexpectedly and has wide-spread ramifications. The event is usually followed with reflection and a flawed rationalization that it was inevitable. The phrase illustrates the frailty of inductive reasoning and the danger of making sweeping generalizations from limited observations. The term came from the idea that if a man saw a thousand swans and they were all white, he might logically conclude that all swans are white. The flaw in his logic is that even when the premises are true, the conclusion can still be false. In other words, just because the man has never seen a black swan, it does not mean they do not exist. As Dutch explorers discovered in 1697, black swans are simply outliers -- rare birds, unknown to Europeans until Willem de Vlamingh and his crew visited Australia. Statistician Nassim Nicholas Taleb uses the phrase black swan as a metaphor for how humans deal with unpredictable events in his 2007...
Post a Comment
Read more

A Graphics Processing Unit (GPU)

A graphics processing unit (GPU) is a computer chip that performs rapid mathematical calculations, primarily for the purpose of rendering images. A GPU may be found integrated with a central processing unit (CPU) on the same circuit, on a graphics card or in the motherboard of a personal computer or server. In the early days of computing, the CPU performed these calculations. As more graphics-intensive applications such as AutoCAD were developed; however, their demands put strain on the CPU and degraded performance. GPUs came about as a way to offload those tasks from CPUs, freeing up their processing power. NVIDIA, AMD, Intel and ARM are some of the major players in the GPU market. GPU vs. CPU A graphics processing unit is able to render images more quickly than a central processing unit because of its parallel processing architecture, which allows it to perform multiple calculations at the same time. A single CPU does not have this capability, although multi...
Post a Comment
Read more

6G (sixth-generation wireless)

6G (sixth-generation wireless) is the successor to 5G cellular technology. 6G networks will be able to use higher frequencies than 5G networks and provide substantially higher capacity and much lower latency. One of the goals of the 6G Internet will be to support one micro-second latency communications, representing 1,000 times faster -- or 1/1000th the latency -- than one millisecond throughput. The 6G technology market is expected to facilitate large improvements in the areas of imaging, presence technology and location awareness. Working in conjunction with AI, the computational infrastructure of 6G will be able to autonomously determine the best location for computing to occur; this includes decisions about data storage, processing and sharing.  Advantages of 6G over 5G 6G is expected to support 1 terabyte per second (Tbps) speeds. This level of capacity and latency will be unprecedented and wi...
Post a Comment
Read more