US Patent 8234515 Repurposable recovery environment

A reconfiguration manager is operable to reconfigure a repurposable recovery environment between a recovery environment for a production environment and a second environment different from the recovery environment. A storage system in the repurposable recovery environment periodically saves production information from the production environment while the repurposable recovery environment is operating as the second environment. The production information in the storage system is used to reconfigure the repurposable recovery environment from the second environment to the recovery environment.