It is important to dedicate hardware. Don't allow test equipment to become production equipment without replacement. Make sure the recovery equipment is always in working order and available at a moment's notice. Some companies purchase recovery equipment, but then install "test only" software. They become dependent on this equipment for production use. In short, keep recovery equipment in a dedicated mode. Another reason to build a lab is for recovery purposes. When you use the EDBUTIL troubleshooting utility, up to two times the disk space of the largest production server information store database is required for recovery and database defragmenting. It is more cost effective for an organization to maintain one recovery server with sufficient disk space.