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RPO and RTO: Key Recovery Metrics

The recovery point objective (RPO) refers to the maximum amount of data loss that is acceptable, while the recovery time objective (RTO) refers to the maximum amount of downtime that is acceptable. The RTO and RPO determine what type of data protection solution is needed, such as high availability clusters, replication, or backup to tape or disk. Solutions with tighter RTOs and RPOs requiring minimal or no data loss and downtime cost more to implement.

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38 views1 page

RPO and RTO: Key Recovery Metrics

The recovery point objective (RPO) refers to the maximum amount of data loss that is acceptable, while the recovery time objective (RTO) refers to the maximum amount of downtime that is acceptable. The RTO and RPO determine what type of data protection solution is needed, such as high availability clusters, replication, or backup to tape or disk. Solutions with tighter RTOs and RPOs requiring minimal or no data loss and downtime cost more to implement.

Uploaded by

hsnel
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© Attribution Non-Commercial (BY-NC)
We take content rights seriously. If you suspect this is your content, claim it here.
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Download as TXT, PDF, TXT or read online on Scribd

The recovery point objective (RPO) and the recovery time objective (RTO) are two very specific

parameters that are closely associated with recovery. The RTO is how long you can basically go without a specific application. This is often associated with your maximum allowable or maximum tolerable outage . The RTO is really used to dictate your use of replication or backup to tape or d isk. That also dictates what you will put together for an infrastructure whether it's a high-availability cluster for seamless failover or something more modest. If your RTO is zero (I cannot go down) then you may opt to have a completely redundant infrastructure with replicated d ata offsite and so on. If your RTO is 48 hours or 72 hours then maybe tape backup is OK for that specific application. That's the RTO. The RPO is slightly different. This dictates the allowable data loss - how much data can I afford to lose? In other words, if I do a nightly backup at 7:00 p.m. and my system goes up in flames at 4:00 p.m. the following d ay, everything that was changed since my last backup is lost. My RPO in this particular context is the previous day's backup. If I'm a company that does online transaction processing - American Express for example - well maybe my RPO is down to the last, latest transaction, the lat est bits of information that came in. Again, that dictates the kind of data protection solution you want in place. So both of them, RTO and RPO, really influence the kind of redundancy or backup infrastructure you will put together. The tighter the RTO, and the tighter the RPO, the more money you will spend on y our infrastructure.

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