Disaster recovery from a Sterling Order Management System Software perspective

In the event of a data center disaster, you may have almost no option other than to re-establish Sterling™ Order Management System Software in a disaster recovery site. This could be an internal site or an office space at a disaster recovery vendor.

Generally, when dealing with a disaster recovery service site, you have to decide on the level of recovery service - the higher the disaster recovery service, the higher the price. Keeping in mind the Insurance Principle, you need to weigh the likelihood of a disaster occurring, and the cost of the disaster recovery service, against the potential impact to your business due to a prolonged outage.

In the disaster recovery industry the terms cold, warm, and hot site recovery are often used to describe the level of service. A cold site recovery is a term that typically refers to a recovery site that may or may not have equipment provisioned. Depending on your disaster recovery contract, you may have to bring all of your equipment, computing nodes, software, and so forth. In some cases, the disaster recovery vendor may have a pool of equipment that you can draw from. In either case, you have to entertain the possibility that you or your vendors may face a shortage of equipment if multiple customers simultaneously declare disasters.

Typically, the software and equipment are not pre-configured in cold site. Therefore, a cold-site recovery involves a very lengthy and complicated recovery from scratch that could take many days.

A warm recovery site is one where the application may be installed on pre-configured standby equipment and nodes. The data in a warm site are generally updated periodically. Recovery in a warm site typically involves bringing the standby database to the latest consistent state. This generally involves applying all the available transaction logs. A warm-site recovery could take up to a day.

A hot recovery site is one where the application is configured and available at a moments notice. The applications data, ranging from the database to configuration information, are synchronized with the primary data center. A hot-site recovery could take a few minutes to a few hours.