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Backup Terminology Explained: What are RPO’s & RTO’s?
When it comes to your data and restoring it, what are your RPO and RTO’s? Are you aware that your backups can be measured in two different ways?
In this article, LETN discuss these 2 measurements and what effect each can have on your business and what you can do to help improve this.
Recovery Point Objective (or RPO) relates to a target time of when your data is backed up and how recent that backup is to the disaster. For instance, a tape backup completed at midnight on a Thursday and a system failure at 1500 on a Friday means that your RPO is 13 hours – potentially you have lost a huge amount of data between the last successful backup and when the system failed! This can be exasperated when you factor in that the above scenario could utilise incremental backups every week night and full backups at the weekend – these full backups can sometimes take an entire weekend to complete due to the volume of data, imagine what that will do when it comes to restoration – having to sift through an enormous amount of data and apply each incremental restore in turn!
Recovery Time Objective (or RTO) relates to the target time taken for the data you have backed up to be restored. In the example above, the clock starts ticking the second disaster strikes and stops ticking the second your system is back up and running. This can take days depending upon the severity of the failure and the quality of the backup taken on the Thursday night and potentially preceding nights.
LETN often engage with customers that want to improve their backups and this is often seen as just a case of reducing a backup window. We would argue that it doesn’t matter how long your backup windows are when it could take days to restore the most crucial thing your business owns – data!
So how do we improve RTO & RPO whilst minimising backup windows? The correct technology in the right place can make all the difference. Whilst tape technology still has a place as an archiving tool, LETN have seen a great shift in pricing to make regular disk based backups much more cost effective and easier to manage. Backup software like Symantec’s Backup Exec can work with both tape and disk technology meaning that you can create a very efficient mesh of technologies, allowing you to provision disk based backup for short to mid-term backups and utilise tape for long-term archival purposes.
Regular disk based SnapShots are one way of improving both RPO and RTO. Vendors like NetApp are able to offer SnapShots that take minutes to complete and more importantly, can be restored within minutes.
There isn’t a one size fits all solution to every organisations requirements. Everyday LETN engage with customers that have differing requirements, and depending upon what blend of RPO and RTO you need, we can firstly help you measure these metrics, and then cut them down to minutes!
To discuss your requirements and how LETN can help, please get in touch with your Account Manager or if you haven’t dealt with us before, please contact our sales team.
