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Support With our work in Continuous Data Protection (CDP) we often end up in discussions about this three letter acronym RPO.
RPO stands for Recovery Point Objective, and in basic terms it is that window of risk between backups. It is the amount of data the business is prepared to lose.
Wikipedia describes it like this:
"..Recovery point objective (RPO) describes a point in time to which data must be restored in order to be acceptable to the owner(s) of the processes supported by that data.
This is often thought of as the time between the last available backup and the time a disruption could potentially occur. The RPO is established based on tolerance for loss of data or re-entering of data..."
( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Recovery_point_objective )
In real terms it works like this. If you do your backup at say midnight everyday, then at 9am the next day the RPO would be 9 hours, at noon it would be 12 hours. The worst case scenario is at 11:59pm, where you have a RPO of 23 hours 59 minutes.
Now, why does this matter? It matters because is your server dies at lunchtime (RPO of 12 hours) you've lost all that data from, this morning. :(
In real terms you have probably only lost 3 hours work (9am-12), but that's still 3 hours lost! How many sales orders, reports, invoices, etc have been lost?
Why this comes up when we talk to people about CDP is pretty easy to illustrate. Keep in mind the example above and take a look at the chart below:
;)
This is a RPO chart taken from a live server with a CDP product called InMage DR-Scout installed. The RPO times are in the range of 1-2 minutes, meaning should something bad happen, at most 2 minutes of data would be lost. We can repeat the question "How many sales orders, reports, invoices, etc have been lost?" but instead of 3 hours think in terms of less than 3 minutes.
The chart above, we should point out is a server being protected via DR-Scout to a target server via a 1MB WAN link (with about 40ms round trip ping times). This server has about 200MB of data "churn" per hour. So what the chart tells us is even in a catastrophic disaster where the entire primary site was lost, our disaster recovery site would have all the data up to at worst 2 minutes before.
Further reading:
Should I replicate data or use continuous data protection?
Does Your Data Protection System Meet Your SLAs?
CDP or Replication for DR and Business Continuity?
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