Brian Nicol Education

DR101: RPO & RTO Explained

Disaster Recovery isn’t just about protection from natural disasters. It’s about ensuring that whatever happens to your infrastructure, you won’t suffer extended downtime.

RPO (Recovery Point Objective)
The last point-in-time that IT systems and applications can be recovered to. RPO is dictated by the replication Technology used.
Backups, Storage Replication, Continuous Data Replication

RTO (Recovery Time Objective)
How quickly applications are recovered and operations are resumed. RTO is influenced by the level of manual vs automated recovery processes.
Boot Ordering of VMs, Re-directing Network Traffic, Recovering Application Stacks Consistently

Brian Nicol Education, Support

How to ask for help!

During my career I have run into support issues where I needed additional help and I had difficulty asking for that help. Soon I realized that most successful people know how and when to ask for help. And most people are inclined to offer help when asked (research backs this up.)

Based on these experiences, I’ve developed some guidelines for how I ask for help:

Identify the problem. This might sound simple, but it’s not.

Learn as much as you can on your own.  Do your own research! Some support issues are so common a simple Internet search can yield a resolution.

Make it easy. Based on the research, perform some preliminary diagnostics which can yield a resolution.

Be clear. If the preliminary diagnostics does not yield a resolution, it’s time to ask for help. During your conversation with the helper, be clear and in great detail describe your issue, research, and preliminary diagnostics preformed.