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How to set the disaster recovery time objective (RTO) of the storage system?

Created on 2025-08-14 18:16:50
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Setting the Disaster Recovery Time Objective (RTO) of a storage system involves determining the maximum acceptable downtime for data and applications after a disruption. RTO defines how quickly you need to restore operations to avoid significant business impact. Here’s how to set it effectively:

1. Assess Business Requirements

Understand which systems or data are critical to your operations. For example, an e-commerce platform may require a very low RTO (e.g., 15 minutes) for its database to prevent revenue loss, while a non-critical archive system might tolerate a higher RTO (e.g., 24 hours).

2. Evaluate Impact of Downtime

Analyze financial losses, regulatory penalties, and reputational damage for different downtime durations. For instance, a financial institution may set a strict RTO of 1 hour for transactional storage due to compliance requirements.

3. Choose a Suitable RTO Based on Risk Tolerance

  • Low RTO (Minutes to Hours): Requires real-time replication, high-availability (HA) clusters, or synchronous backups. Example: A banking system using synchronous storage replication with a secondary site to ensure near-instant failover.
  • Medium RTO (Hours to 1 Day): Can use periodic snapshots and asynchronous replication. Example: A media company backing up files hourly and restoring from snapshots within 4 hours.
  • High RTO (1 Day or More): Accepts longer recovery times, often relying on tape backups or manual intervention. Example: An internal HR database with a daily backup and a 12-hour RTO.

4. Implement Storage Solutions to Meet RTO

  • For Low RTO: Use continuous data protection (CDP) or real-time replication (e.g., Tencent Cloud’s CBS with cross-region replication).
  • For Medium RTO: Schedule frequent snapshots (e.g., hourly) and store them in a separate zone.
  • For High RTO: Rely on scheduled backups (daily/weekly) with a longer recovery window.

5. Test and Adjust RTO Regularly

Conduct disaster recovery drills to validate if the RTO is achievable. If recovery takes longer than expected, optimize storage redundancy or upgrade infrastructure.

By aligning RTO with business needs and leveraging the right storage technologies (such as Tencent Cloud’s reliable block storage and backup services), you can ensure minimal disruption during outages.