RTO — Recovery Time Objective
Definition
The maximum acceptable time to restore a system to operational status after a failure or disaster.
Context & Usage
RTO is set per workload during DR planning. Tier-1 systems may have RTO of minutes (hot standby site, automated failover). Tier-2 systems accept RTO of hours (warm standby, manual cutover). Tier-3 systems may accept RTO of days (cold backup restore). Hardware impact: high-availability clusters (vSphere HA, Pacemaker) deliver RTO in minutes; tape-restore scenarios may have RTO in days.
Examples
- VMware vSphere HA with VM restart on host failure = RTO 1-2 min
- Bare-metal restore from Veeam = RTO 1-2 hr
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