Data Protection, Disaster Recovery, and Business Continuity
What this domain tests
Snapshots, protection policies, replication, RPO/RTO, Leap recovery plans, and Metro availability.
Core rules and concepts
- Snapshots are local, space-efficient restore points. They are not off-site backups by themselves.
- Protection policies schedule snapshots and replication to a remote cluster. Protection domains group VMs and consistency groups.
- Async replication has an RPO equal to the schedule interval. NearSync reduces RPO to seconds or minutes. Sync replication gives RPO 0 but needs low latency.
- Leap orchestrates DR with recovery plans, runbooks, and testing.
- Metro Availability stretches a cluster across sites with synchronous replication. A witness provides tie-breaking.
- RTO is recovery time, not data loss. Test failover to validate it.
Worked example
A customer needs RPO 15 minutes and RTO 1 hour. Use an async protection policy with a 15-minute schedule to a remote cluster, plus a Leap recovery plan with ordered boot steps. If the customer demands RPO 0, propose Metro or sync replication, but validate latency and witness design. A nightly snapshot alone fails the 15-minute RPO.
Traps
Do not equate snapshots with backups. Do not promise RPO 0 with async replication. Do not forget witness and quorum for two-site stretches. Do not assume replication replaces application-consistent backups. Do not test DR only on paper.