Good day,
I think that you have to be careful in your studies, do not attempt to map
word for word what is written in books. There are so many factors
surrounding the decision of doing a parallel test that a simply one liner
would not cut it.
A parallel test is defined in the DRP glossary as:
A parallel test invovles bringing the recovery site to a state of
operational readiness, but maintaining operations at the primary site. Thus
staff are relocated, backup tapes transferred, and operational readiness
established in accordance with the disaster recovery plan while operations
at the primary site continue normally.
What this means exactly will vary from company to company. As you have read
in the two books mentioned, the first thing you should do before doing any
testing is to define what is the goal of the tests that you are going to
perform. It could be as simply as testing the tape backup restore
functionality to being able to process all business functions that you
identified as priorities in your plan at the alternate site.
It is very hard to give you an accurate answer without knowing what was
before and after the line that you extracted from the two books. A line out
of context can be very misleading.
Myself I do like the definition from the glossary above, your company might
have opted to used their own campus or building for recovery (which would
not be optimal in case of a large scale disaster) but it does not
automatically mean that you are moving to an offsite facility. As specified
above: it involves bringing the recovery site to a state of operational
readiness. From that point what exactly take place would depend on your
plan and the scope and goals of the testing that you are currently doing.
Take care
Clement
