Olivia’s organization operates servers in a datacenter that support customers across the country. As Olivia is determining her service level agreements, what information is most important in determining how quickly a server can be restored to operation if its motherboard fails?

Mean time to repair, or MTTR, is the average time it takes to repair a system or device, and Olivia needs to know that to determine what she can promise in her service level agreements that rely on server repair timelines. A recovery time objective, or RTO, is set by organizations to describe how long restoring systems or services to normal function after a disruption can take; it doesn’t determine how fast the server can be fixed but sets a goal that needs to take things like repair and recovery time into account as it is determined. A recovery point objective, or RPO, describes how much data can be lost in the event of an outage or issue, and the mean time between failures (MTBF) is a measure of the reliability of a system. It is the expected amount of time that will elapse between system failures.