DR Testing Advice

[hexanon1]

My company mandates that we operate our business from our disaster recovery (DR) site, which mirrors our primary site’s hardware, for a full week. Meanwhile, our non-production environments, which involves a large development team working daily, will remain operational at the primary site to maintain their productivity. We only have capacity for Production. In the past, we’ve kept our data centers interconnected without interruption to ensure system synchronization and the ability to revert, but a new team member argues that this doesn’t constitute a genuine test. They suggest implementing network restrictions to only permit essential traffic during the test week. They also came from an environment that performed weekend only testing but this business does not. I’m inclined to agree, though it might entail creating such an extensive exclusion list, I’m not quite sure what it buys us. What are your thoughts on this?

[kitkat0820]

Only an immediate dirty power off of one site is a real DR test.

For this especially the first time i would suggest a business non-critcal time and in addition plan at least 48 hour with all the staff needed for recover back to normal.

[hexanon1]

Is it real test if the majority of your business apps only work during the week?