Services / Infrastructure & The Bunker / Disaster Recovery in a Tier III Data Center — Houston
Disaster Recovery in a Tier III Data Center — Houston
DR hosting inland of the Ship Channel surge zone, in a Tier III facility engineers are physically inside every day.
Named-storm season in Houston is a planning constraint, not a rumor. Coastal and Ship Channel-adjacent facilities carry real evacuation risk every year. Mako's disaster recovery service runs your warm-standby or active-standby replica in the Westland Bunker — a Tier III data center located inland of the surge zone, on separate power infrastructure, staffed by the same engineers who run your primary environment. When the coast is under mandatory evacuation, your business is already running from the Bunker. When the event is over, we fail back cleanly.
What’s included
The specifics.
- ✓Warm-standby, active-standby, and active-active DR architectures sized to your RTO / RPO
- ✓Inland Tier III colocation host site (Westland Bunker)
- ✓Replication via VMware, Hyper-V, Veeam, Zerto, or native application replication
- ✓Documented DR runbook tuned to your specific environment, not a generic template
- ✓Scheduled DR drills with RTO / RPO measured and reported
- ✓Named-storm pre-event checklist and failover rehearsal
- ✓Failback procedures that don't leave you running on the DR site indefinitely
- ✓Cyber-DR — immutable backups separate from production, for ransomware-event recovery
- ✓Coordinated response during an event — our on-call runs the failover, you run the business
- ✓Post-event recovery report with what worked, what didn't, and what to change
Who needs this
Houston businesses with Ship Channel, coastal, or petrochem-corridor primary sites that carry named-storm evacuation risk. Healthcare practices whose EHR downtime has both patient-care and HIPAA-breach-timer consequences. Maritime and logistics operators whose vessel / gate / terminal operations can't pause for a week. Any Houston-metro business that treats disaster recovery as something more specific than 'we have cloud backups.'
FAQ
Disaster Recovery in a Tier III Data Center — Houston — common questions.
How is this different from just backing up to the cloud?+
Backups restore your data. DR restores your business. A backup says 'we have a copy of your VM.' DR says 'we have a working copy of your VM running on standby infrastructure with documented RTO, a tested failover procedure, network pathing that actually carries your traffic, and a runbook our on-call has rehearsed.' The difference is measured in days — versus hours or minutes — when a real event happens.
What RTO and RPO are realistic?+
It depends on the architecture. Warm-standby: RTO typically hours, RPO 15 min to 1 hour. Active-standby: RTO 30 min, RPO under 15 min. Active-active: RTO near-zero, RPO near-zero. We scope to your business tolerance and the economics that make sense for your workload — not a one-size number we print on every proposal.
Why inland vs. another coastal data center?+
Hurricane Harvey did structural damage to multiple 'redundant' data center pairs that were both inside the Houston-area surge / flooding zone. Real geographic redundancy means the DR site is outside the hazard radius of the primary. The Westland Bunker sits inland of the Ship Channel surge zone, on separate power infrastructure, behind different grid dependencies. That's the point.
Do we have to use Mako as our MSP to use the DR service?+
Not strictly — but the coordination wins are significant. DR events are stress tests. Having the same engineers who run your primary also run the failover means fewer handoff failures during an actual event. For MSPs in other markets, we do offer white-label DR hosting in the Bunker as a partner offering.
How often do you test the failover?+
Once a year minimum for standard tiers; quarterly for higher-tier clients and regulated environments (HIPAA, CMMC). Every drill produces a report with the measured RTO / RPO, what broke, and what got fixed. If we've never tested it, we don't claim it works.
What about cyber DR — a ransomware event, not a weather event?+
Cyber-DR is handled separately from geographic DR, because the failure modes are different. Ransomware-resistant immutable backups are kept on isolated infrastructure. The recovery playbook assumes the primary environment may be compromised end-to-end. Our ransomware-recovery posture is why no current Mako client has paid a ransom. We plan for the paranoid case.
Can this coexist with cloud (Azure / AWS) DR?+
Yes, and often does. Some workloads DR naturally to cloud; some don't. Our job is architecting the right answer — not pushing every workload toward whichever platform we'd earn more margin on.
Questions about disaster recovery in a tier iii data center — houston?
Twenty minutes, real conversation, no pressure.