Written by Rack Alley
This a basic step by step guide to setting up a cold site at a la data center for a small to medium sized company that has its own application servers in house.
Virtualize
The first step to making a relatively quick (read: hours to days) transition from your office to a cold site with server hosting Los Angeles during a disaster is to virtualize all critical servers in the organization. Ideally, an in-house cluster is the best way to maintain redundancy at the main site.
Backup
Daily backups of critical data and weekly backups of all other data is the next step to put in place. This data can then be restored at the cold site in the event of a disaster. These backups can be taken on tape or disk but need to be stored at an offsite location. Ideally, this would be away from the office.
Replicate
Any critical systems where any data loss cannot be tolerated should be replicated in real time to the cold site. Since the workloads would have been virtualized systems like Hyper-v can replicate to another over the internet every few minutes.
You now have a system where in the event of a disaster, the critical system can be failed over, at which point the restore process from backups can begin. After some DNS and other changes, the cold site is brought up until the main site can be restored.
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Rack Alley provides premium LA colocation services perfect for small and enterprise customers at their Los Angeles data center