Recovery Time Objectives - How can I come up with a real world number...
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Recovery Time Objectives, you know those things that you try to meet during a system emergency (like recovering a dead VM, or restoring a file or network share).
What are some ways that I can measure this and come up with a real world number for a few of the cases below?
- Recover fileshare ~2TB
- Recover entire file server VM ~8TB (today)
- Revert a VM due to failed Windows Updates
- Migrate all VM's from one host to another (planned or unplanned Host issues/maintenance)
Also what are some of your RTOs?
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Only really good way is to test.
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@scottalanmiller So I should just put arbitrary numbers on the DRP I'm writing and see what happens?
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How accurate would you say something like this (RTO calculator) is?
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Isn't this a business thing? The business should mandate an RTO and IT should build a system that reflects that? Or am I missing something.
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Testing is the only way you can reliably do it.
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@coliver I would think so too, but as I'm creating the entire DRP I have to fill it in, it can be changed later.
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@coliver said in Recovery Time Objectives - How can I come up with a real world number...:
Isn't this a business thing? The business should mandate an RTO and IT should build a system that reflects that? Or am I missing something.
that's not at all how it should work, but often how it does.
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I honestly don't even know how to fill in the table. I have no idea what our average employee cost is.
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@DustinB3403 said in Recovery Time Objectives - How can I come up with a real world number...:
I honestly don't even know how to fill in the table. I have no idea what our average employee cost is.
That's purely not for IT to be involved in.
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@DustinB3403 said in Recovery Time Objectives - How can I come up with a real world number...:
I honestly don't even know how to fill in the table. I have no idea what our average employee cost is.
That's a question you should ask the HR and Accounting departments.
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I shouldn't ask they should have to review the document and perform the calculations and come back with an answer. I'm just attempting to put something on paper.
Which maybe I shouldn't?
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@scottalanmiller said in Recovery Time Objectives - How can I come up with a real world number...:
@coliver said in Recovery Time Objectives - How can I come up with a real world number...:
Isn't this a business thing? The business should mandate an RTO and IT should build a system that reflects that? Or am I missing something.
that's not at all how it should work, but often how it does.
So IT should be in charge of defining RTO. My assumption was that this is an accounting thing where you define how long you can afford to be down for and design a system that can recover by, or before, that time period.
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@coliver said in Recovery Time Objectives - How can I come up with a real world number...:
@scottalanmiller said in Recovery Time Objectives - How can I come up with a real world number...:
@coliver said in Recovery Time Objectives - How can I come up with a real world number...:
Isn't this a business thing? The business should mandate an RTO and IT should build a system that reflects that? Or am I missing something.
that's not at all how it should work, but often how it does.
So IT should be in charge of defining RTO.
Yes. RTO is generated by a combination of the financial figures provided by the business and IT applying those numbers to technical realities. The business is incapable of providing a usable RTO, only IT can do that. The business does not know what RTO is possible at what cost.
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@scottalanmiller said in Recovery Time Objectives - How can I come up with a real world number...:
@coliver said in Recovery Time Objectives - How can I come up with a real world number...:
@scottalanmiller said in Recovery Time Objectives - How can I come up with a real world number...:
@coliver said in Recovery Time Objectives - How can I come up with a real world number...:
Isn't this a business thing? The business should mandate an RTO and IT should build a system that reflects that? Or am I missing something.
that's not at all how it should work, but often how it does.
So IT should be in charge of defining RTO.
Yes. RTO is generated by a combination of the financial figures provided by the business and IT applying those numbers to technical realities. The business is incapable of providing a usable RTO, only IT can do that. The business does not know what RTO is possible at what cost.
Ok, so I was half wrong. Thanks for clearing that up.
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@coliver said in Recovery Time Objectives - How can I come up with a real world number...:
My assumption was that this is an accounting thing where you define how long you can afford to be down for and design a system that can recover by, or before, that time period.
That's one of the most dangerous business myths around IT. That there are these "lines" to be drawn. Like "we can be down one hour, but not two." It's completely not reflective of real life. If you say that "you cannot be down for two hours", you imply that it is worth one penny short of the entire potential value of the business to protect against a two hour outage. Obviously, that's absurd. But that is what that statement tells the IT department.
All disaster prevention and recovery is based around cost for protection. The more protection you want, the more it cost. How much it cost to be down and what the risk aversion is are business decisions. How that translates into usable RPO/RTO is that defined by IT based on those numbers. Otherwise, totally insane things happen like spending $100K to protect against a $5K outage.
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In the real world companies lose money by the hour. No viable company can't be down for hours or days, most can be down for weeks or months. Not that it wouldn't hurt, but they can be and still survive. The "we can't be down for more than X" idea makes no sense because it basically says "don't bother recovering faster than this because we aren't saying that there is any value" and then "don't bother trying to recover if you can't make this line because we will be out of business." No business loses nothing for a day, then suddenly goes out of business taking all of their losses in one second.
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I guess I mis-worded my original statement. Or didn't write it appropriately. I assumed that the cost of downtime vs the cost of a solution would be taken into account when defining the RTO. Although you've cleared it up significantly.
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To answer the original question: How can I come up with a real world number...
You can't. Business systems are too complex to come up with a single figure. And disasters are always too unpredictable. The exercise is a bullshit marketing job to convince someone to spend some money.
IMHO
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@Carnival-Boy said in Recovery Time Objectives - How can I come up with a real world number...:
To answer the original question: How can I come up with a real world number...
You can't. Business systems are too complex to come up with a single figure. And disasters are always too unpredictable. The exercise is a bullshit marketing job to convince someone to spend some money.
IMHO
I agree, it's not something that I think IT should be doing at all. You get numbers, you make a reasonable investment. You might have some guess as to recovery times which are useful for triage (like does it take one hour or ten hours to get systems back off of the tape) but RTO/RPO are just silly. In all my years I've never had an occasion to use them.
