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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.

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