Dell EMC Metro node 7.0.1 Administrator Guide

RPO and RTO

Recovery Point Objective (RPO): RPO is the time interval between the point of failure of a storage system and the expected point in the past to which the storage system is capable of recovering customer data.

RPO is a maximum amount of data loss that can be tolerated by the application after a failure. The value of the RPO is highly dependent upon the recovery technique used. For example, RPO for backups is typically days; for asynchronous replication minutes; and for mirroring or synchronous replication seconds or instantaneous.

Recovery Time Objective (RTO): RTO is the time duration within which a storage solution is expected to recover from failure and begin servicing application requests.

RTO is the longest tolerable application outage due to a failure of a storage system. RTO is a function of the storage technology. It may measure in hours for backup systems, minutes for a remote replication, and seconds (or less) for a mirroring.