Disaster tolerant system architecture is a must to protect companies against unplanned system down time that is caused by natural calamity. While creating disaster recovery systems companies must assess the risk caused by the calamity and vulnerability that the business is subjected to.

Risk

1. Assess if the company is situated in areas prone to tornadoes, floods, or earthquakes. Also include factors like sabotage or any other external threats that are possible.

2. Determine the type of disaster recovery based on the most likely calamity that may occur in that area. For example, if the area is prone to earthquakes, plan for backups in another remote location instead of anywhere near to the same place.

3. Assess the frequency of the disaster. This will help to invest in a rapid disaster recovery solution.

Vulnerability

1. Assess how long your business can afford to be down.

2. Assess how long your recovery solutions will take to bring business back on its feet.

3. Assess systems that are critical and need to be up again at the earliest, along with the most appropriate level of protection for them.

To accomplish all this, disaster recovery products (software) should possess the following characteristics:

1. A central recovery platform that supports both physical and virtual environments.

2. Is not tied to any single virtual OS.

3. Support heterogeneous applications, servers and storage.

4. An integrated platform that collects data once but can make it available to multiple different sources for a variety of reasons (recovery, test, development, reporting, data migration, etc.).

5. Can move to a differential model that can then make data available wherever and in whatever form it is needed (locally, remotely, block level, file level, or system level).

6. Handle application or data recovery locally or remotely by leveraging disk-based recovery and recovery automation to reduce risk and improve recovery reliability.

7. Support application-consistent recovery with minimal overhead.

8. Meet strict RPO and RTO requirements.

Article Source: http://www.ArticleBlast.com