Your organization's business-continuity plan specifies a recovery time objective of four days and a 24-hour recovery point objective for a non-critical archival records system. Senior management insists on the lowest possible recurring cost for the alternate facility. Only power, climate control, and network connectivity need to be in place ahead of time; the IT staff is prepared to ship in hardware and restore data from nightly backups after a disaster occurs. Which type of disaster-recovery site BEST meets these requirements?
Fully equipped hot site synchronized with production systems
Partially provisioned warm site with pre-installed servers but inactive data
Cold site that supplies only basic utilities and floor space
Active-active metropolitan cluster running live workloads in multiple datacenters
A cold site is essentially an empty shell that provides only fundamental infrastructure (electricity, HVAC, network access). Because it contains no pre-installed servers, storage, or data, its recurring cost is the lowest of the common DR-site options. The trade-off is a longer recovery time while equipment is delivered, installed, and backups are restored-often several days-making it appropriate when an RTO of multiple days is acceptable.
A hot site, in contrast, is fully equipped and kept in sync with production workloads, offering near-immediate failover but at the highest operating cost. A warm site already hosts some hardware and possibly partial data replication, shortening recovery time but still costing more than a cold site. An active-active metropolitan cluster keeps live services running in two or more datacenters simultaneously; this provides the fastest recovery and virtually no downtime but is by far the most expensive to maintain. Therefore, the cold site is the only option that satisfies the strict cost constraint while meeting the stated four-day RTO.
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