If you're running production in Seattle, your DR site probably shouldn't be in Seattle. IDACORE Boise sits 23ms from Seattle, outside the Cascadia subduction zone, on a different power grid, with 12-month terms and no 36-month lock-in. You can be racked and routing traffic this week.
Why Does Seattle Need a DR Site Outside the Region At All?
Let's start with the uncomfortable math. The Cascadia Subduction Zone runs along the Pacific coast from northern California through British Columbia, and it's capable of producing a magnitude 9.0 earthquake. Seismologists put the odds of a major rupture in the next 50 years at roughly 1 in 3. That's not a fringe scenario you file away and forget. That's a real number that should show up in your risk register.
Here's the problem with a lot of DR planning: companies build redundancy across two facilities that share the same fault line. You've got a primary in downtown Seattle and a "backup" in Tacoma or Renton. Great, except a Cascadia event doesn't care about city limits. Power grids fail together. Fiber routes fail together. Even if your second data center survives structurally, if the region's electrical grid is down for weeks, your redundancy plan was never a redundancy plan. It was two copies of the same risk.
Real disaster recovery means geographic separation from the hazard, not just physical separation of servers. Boise sits outside the subduction zone entirely, on Idaho Power's grid, with its own independent seismic profile. When we say different fault line, we mean it literally, not as a marketing line.
What Does "Different Fault Line" Actually Buy You?
It buys you a DR site that isn't going down for the same reason your primary went down. That's the entire point of disaster recovery, and it's the part most regional redundancy plans miss. A DR site 20 miles from your primary is convenient for testing failover, sure. But it's not insurance against the event most likely to actually take you offline.
How Much Latency Does Boise Add to a Seattle Failover?
23ms. That's the round-trip latency from Boise to Seattle over our on-net carrier mix, which includes Zayo, Lumen/Level 3, Cogent, CenturyLink, Syringa, Cable One, and Hurricane Electric. For most DR architectures — database replication, backup sync, warm-standby application tiers — 23ms is a rounding error. It's not fast enough for synchronous transaction replication if you need sub-5ms round trips, but almost nobody actually needs that for DR. You need async replication that completes within your RPO window, and 23ms gets you there with room to spare.
Compare that to a lot of companies' current "DR" setup: a second AWS region on the opposite coast, adding 60-70ms, or a facility overseas for data residency reasons that adds even more. Boise gives you regional-grade latency with a genuinely different risk profile.
| DR Site Option | Latency from Seattle | Same Fault Line? | Data Stays in Region? |
|---|---|---|---|
| Second Seattle-metro facility | <5ms | Yes | Yes |
| IDACORE Boise | 23ms | No | Yes (Idaho) |
| AWS us-east-1 | ~65-70ms | No | No |
| Overseas DR facility | 100ms+ | No | No |
What Does It Cost to Stand Up a Boise DR Environment?
This is where a lot of DR plans die in committee. Traditional colocation makes you commit to a full cabinet or a minimum power draw before you've validated the failover architecture actually works. IDACORE Boise doesn't do that. We rent per-U, 1U minimum, no power commitment minimum. You're billed $300/kW/month based on what your gear actually draws — not a flat fee for the rack space you occupy.
That distinction matters more for DR than for any other workload. A DR environment often isn't running at full production load. You might have two 1U servers doing replication and log shipping, sipping 250W combined. At $300/kW/month, that's $75/month in colocation. Compare that to a competitor's flat per-U or per-cabinet rate, which you pay whether your DR boxes are idling at 10% utilization or maxed out — a common market pattern is a flat monthly rate per U regardless of actual power draw, which stops making sense the moment your DR footprint is small and mostly idle.
Real example: a Seattle-based healthcare SaaS company runs their production stack on-prem and needed a compliant DR target for HIPAA-covered data. They stood up two rack-mount servers in Boise — one for a warehoused database replica, one for a lightweight app-tier standby — pulling about 400W combined. That's $120/month in power-billed colocation, plus a 1G transit commit at $600/month for replication traffic. Total infrastructure cost under $750/month for a compliant, geographically separated DR environment that can go live within their RPO/RTO targets.
What About Compliance During Failover?
If your production workload touches HIPAA, PCI, or financial data, your DR site needs the same certifications as primary, not a lesser standard you hope nobody audits. IDACORE Boise is SOC 2 Type II, PCI DSS, NIST 800-53, SSAE-16, and HITRUST CSF certified, and the facility is built compliance-ready for HIPAA, financial services, and government workloads. You're not trading compliance posture for geographic diversity — you get both.
Does Data Actually Stay in the Region?
Yes, and this matters more than most DR plans account for. Idaho and Oregon data residency means your replicated data doesn't cross state lines into a jurisdiction with different data handling requirements. If you're already navigating HIPAA or state privacy law for your Seattle production environment, a DR site that keeps data within the Pacific Northwest — rather than shipping it to a hyperscaler region in Virginia or Ohio — simplifies your compliance story instead of complicating it.
How Do You Actually Architect the Failover?
Most of our DR customers run one of two patterns. The first is warm standby: application servers running in Boise at reduced capacity, database replication running continuously, DNS failover triggered manually or via health check automation. The second is backup-and-restore: nightly or hourly snapshot replication to Boise, with recovery time measured in hours rather than seconds.
Which one you pick depends on your RTO, not on what Boise can support — we can support either. The bandwidth side is where a lot of companies underestimate their commit. If you're replicating a few hundred GB nightly, a 1G commit at $600/month (billed 95th percentile) is plenty. If you're doing continuous synchronous-adjacent replication of a large dataset, you'll want to size up — 10G runs $2,000/month and gives you $0.20/Mbps, which is a lot cheaper per unit than paying for headroom you don't use on a smaller tier.
One thing worth being direct about: we peer this traffic ourselves. We're not reselling a transit contract from somebody else and marking it up. We built and ran an ISP with our own ASN and BGP peering at the Seattle Internet Exchange, so when you're troubleshooting a replication lag issue at 2am, you're talking to people who understand the routing path, not a ticket queue reading from a script.
Frequently Asked Questions
Is Boise far enough from Seattle to be a real disaster recovery site?
Yes. Boise sits outside the Cascadia Subduction Zone and on a different power grid than Seattle, with 23ms round-trip latency. That combination gives you genuine geographic and seismic separation while staying close enough for practical async replication and fast failover within typical RPO/RTO windows.
What does IDACORE Boise charge for a small DR footprint?
Colocation is billed at $300/kW/month based on actual power draw, not rack space, with a 1U minimum and no power commitment minimum. A small DR deployment of two servers drawing 400W would run around $120/month in colocation, plus IP transit priced by commit tier starting at $170/month for 100M.
Does a Boise DR site keep our data compliant with HIPAA?
Yes. IDACORE Boise is SOC 2 Type II, PCI DSS, NIST 800-53, SSAE-16, and HITRUST CSF certified, and the facility is built compliance-ready for HIPAA, financial, and government workloads. Data also stays within Idaho, supporting data residency requirements tied to state and federal compliance frameworks.
How much bandwidth do we need for replication traffic to Boise?
It depends on your replication method and data volume. Nightly snapshot-based replication of a few hundred GB typically fits comfortably within a 1G commit at $600/month. Continuous replication of larger datasets may need a 10G commit at $2,000/month, priced at $0.20/Mbps under 95th percentile billing.
Can we start small and scale the DR environment if failover testing goes well?
Yes. IDACORE Boise has no minimum rack or power commitment, so you can start with a single 1U server for initial testing and add capacity as your DR architecture matures, without renegotiating a contract or moving to a different facility tier.
If Seattle is your primary and your current DR plan is "a second building in the same metro," it's time to look at what a genuinely different fault line and grid gets you. Talk to our team about standing up a Boise DR environment and we'll walk through sizing your colocation footprint and transit commit around your actual RPO and RTO.
