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Viewpoint: Time to recovery vital for business continuity

By Sasha Malic
Johannesburg, 25 Nov 2015
True high availability means that the production server is continuously replicated, says ContinuitySA's Sasha Malic.
True high availability means that the production server is continuously replicated, says ContinuitySA's Sasha Malic.

Time to recovery for production systems is an increasingly vital business question in the Digital Age. Server replication is changing the game, and provides a useful complement to the backup strategies to deliver the right level of availability.

When production systems fail, the vital question is how quickly can they be restored and how much data will be lost.

Using tape, as I have indicated in previous columns, can be extremely time-consuming - a hiatus that most businesses simply can't tolerate in today's always-on business environments.

A proper back-up solution as described in the previous two articles describes the long-term solution for retention of backups, but many companies also need to recover critical production servers in a very short period of time and with minimal loss of data. These servers are the ones that the business simply has to have up and running at all times.

The solution is to replicate the critical servers by taking server snapshots on a regular basis and, according to the defined Recovery Point Objective, to be stored on and/or offsite.

The key differentiator between server replication and conventional backup is that the backup is stored on a backup medium that is unsuitable for running servers, and has to be restored to high speed storage with processing, whereas server replication typically resides on a server with high speed disk, so one can fail over onto it and run the workloads without a slow restore.

Server replication is becoming more affordable as technology advances and bandwidth prices come down. There are different levels of availability, and choosing the right one would depend on how quickly the business requires the server to be available and the recovery point objective (RPO).

True high availability means that the production server is continuously replicated so that it's possible to switch between them with no loss of data or functionality; near high availability might mean taking a snapshot on a scheduled basis, which means the RPO will be the time elapsed between successful incremental replications.

This is obviously quite a complex process, but it can be offered as a service by a third-party specialist provider. I wrote in a previous article that the "as-a-service" mindset is changing everything, including business continuity.

Working with a specialist provider, a company can combine backup and server replication to deliver a high availability solution that is customised to its needs and strategy.

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