Disaster recovery overview
For the purposes of this article, we define disaster recovery as the ability to recover from a situation in which a data center that hosts SharePoint Server becomes unavailable.
The disaster recovery strategy that you use for SharePoint Server must be coordinated with the disaster recovery strategy for the related infrastructure, including Active Directory domains, Exchange Server, and Microsoft SQL Server. Work with the administrators of the infrastructure that you rely on to design a coordinated disaster recovery strategy and plan.
The time and immediate effort to get another farm up and running in a different location is often referred to as a hot, warm, or cold standby. Our definitions for these terms are as follows:
Hot standby A second data center that can provide availability within seconds or minutes.
Warm standby A second data center that can provide availability within minutes or hours.
Cold standby A second data center that can provide availability within hours or days.
Disaster recovery can be one of the more expensive requirements for a system. The shorter the interval between failure and availability and the more systems you protect, the more complex and costly a disaster recovery solution is likely to be. When you invest in hot or warm standby data centers, costs include:
- Additional hardware and software, which often increase the complexity of operations between software applications, such as custom scripts for failover and recovery.
- Additional operational complexity.
Reference: technet.microsoft.com
