N10-009 Question 219
Single answerDR sites: Cold site, Warm site, Hot siteA regional healthcare provider is updating its disaster recovery plan after a prolonged power failure shut down its primary data center for two days. Leadership wants a secondary location that can restore critical patient scheduling and billing systems within a few hours, but they do not want to pay for a fully mirrored environment with live production systems running at all times. Which type of DR site best meets these requirements?
- A
Cold site
- B
Warm site
- C
Hot site
- D
Offline archival storage
Show answer and explanation
Correct answer: B
Explanation
The correct answer is warm site because the organization needs a balance between recovery speed and cost. In common disaster recovery planning, a cold site offers the least readiness and lowest cost, a warm site provides partial readiness with moderate cost and moderate recovery time, and a hot site offers the highest readiness, shortest recovery time, and highest cost. For an environment that must restore critical services within hours but does not require a fully mirrored, always-running duplicate data center, a warm site is the most practical choice. This aligns with standard business continuity and disaster recovery best practices used across IT operations: match the recovery solution to business requirements such as recovery time objective (RTO), recovery point objective (RPO), and budget. CompTIA Network+ objectives commonly expect candidates to distinguish DR site types based on readiness, cost, and expected recovery timelines.
- A. Incorrect.
A cold site is typically just a facility with space, power, and networking capability, but little to no preinstalled server infrastructure or current data. It has the lowest cost, but recovery usually takes the longest because equipment must be installed and data restored before services can resume. That does not align well with a requirement to restore key services within a few hours.
- B. Correct.
A warm site is the best fit. It usually has some hardware, connectivity, and baseline systems already in place, but it is not a fully synchronized live environment. Because it is partially prepared, it can support recovery faster than a cold site while costing less than a hot site. This matches the scenario's need for recovery within a few hours without paying for full real-time duplication.
- C. Incorrect.
A hot site would provide the fastest recovery because systems, connectivity, and current data replication are typically ready for immediate or near-immediate failover. However, the scenario specifically says leadership does not want to pay for a fully mirrored environment with live production systems running continuously. That makes a hot site more capable than necessary and more expensive than desired.
- D. Incorrect.
Offline archival storage is not a DR site type. Backups are important to disaster recovery, but storing data offline does not provide a ready secondary operating location with infrastructure, connectivity, and systems for business resumption. Someone might choose this if they confuse backup media with a recovery site.