In this ongoing video series, W. Curtis Preston, aka Mr. Backup, and Chief Technologist at Druva will walk through some of the key principles and terminology of data management, such as RPO/RTO, endpoints, object storage vs. block storage and how to protect corporate data. You can always leave us questions in the comments or find us @druvainc.
When talking about data protection, two of the most important values that all parties need to agree on are recovery time objective (RTO) and recovery point objective (RPO). RTO is the amount of time we all agree that a recovery can take, while RPO is the amount of data that we all agree is acceptable to be lost in a recovery situation.
One of the most common mistakes people make about RTO is assuming it refers to the time it takes to restore your data. In fact, it is measured from the beginning of the outage and includes time required for repairing the server, installing applications, and restoring data. For example, if you have an RTO of four hours and a server fails at noon, it is expected to be fully repaired and operational by 4 p.m. to meet the target RTO.
RPO refers to the amount of data we say we can lose. For example, if there is a one hour RPO, it is understood that the company can lose (or re-enter) one hour’s worth of data due to a failure without disrupting business continuity. However, traditional backup systems, can take several hours to backup which means that at a minimum, the RTO will be several hours in addition to the amount of time it takes to repair the system in question. It may also run once a night, which means it can only support an RPO of about 24 hours.
The Druva Difference
With Druva’s cloud-native solutions offered as-a-service, users are able to unify backup, disaster recovery, and archival in the cloud, removing the burden of legacy infrastructure and significantly lowering TCO by up to 60 percent. This also offers customers flexibility when it comes to their RTO and RPO needs.
Druva customers can meet an RPO as low as one hour, since backups run quicker and take up fewer resources than traditional backups, due to our use of source global deduplication. Druva customers can also meet stringent RTO requirements with three different ways to restore. Most customers find they are able to meet their RTO needs by restoring directly from the cloud, but those with more aggressive RTOs can use our CloudCache offering, which provides a cached copy of their data in their data center for much faster restores – at no additional charge. Customers also have the option to use our Cloud-DR functionality, which can instantiate a copy of a VM within minutes in the cloud. This can be used when restoring in place is not possible – such as in a disaster, test/dev, or workload mobility purposes.
To learn more about understanding RPO and RTO, read our extensive blog post. Interested in learning more about Druva’s solutions? Take a free trial here.