Disaster recovery planning is a critical part of any large data-intensive enterprise data center environment. In today's data-driven economy, a few hours of downtime can cost a company tens of thousands of dollars. Enterprises face the challenges of protecting enormous volumes of data, complying with complex regulations, controlling rapid data growth, and managing geographically dispersed data centers.

Small and medium sized companies can meet this challenge by simply copying data to physical tape and shipping the tapes to an off-site storage facility. They can also replicate data over their network with a disk-based backup system. However, solutions that would suffice for smaller organizationss like tape and many disk-based solutions lack the performance, capacity, and automation necessary to meet the needs of large, dataintensive organizations. This article describes the five key factors to consider when choosing an enterprise disaster recovery solution.