Data storage and availability is one of the most important components to virtually all businesses in this day and age.\u00a0 From our websites, HR\/payroll, general data repositories, databases and beyond \u2013 each data set may have a different level of importance to an organization in terms of availability, number of backup copies, need for geo-diverse data sets etc.<\/p>\n
At Wowrack, we help customers day-in and day-out with assessing the importance of this data by analyzing lost revenue as a result of downtime, need for high availability, geodiversity, and also managing the switchover process in the event of downtime.<\/p>\n
What is backup?<\/strong><\/p>\n Backups are one that most are familiar with.\u00a0 Backups are data that is copied to another environment, rather which be another disk, a cloud environment, or tape.\u00a0 Backups are your cheapest insurance option, protecting you from theft (cloud backups are best for this), employee accidents, crashed hard drives and corrupt RAID\u2019s.<\/p>\n What is disaster recovery?<\/strong><\/p>\n While similar to backups, its very different in nature.\u00a0 Disaster Recovery focuses on more of business analytics, where your data sets are assessed in terms of recovery time (RTO), recovery point (RPO), cost of downtime, and the recovery solution to fit the organizations goals.<\/p>\n Active-Active<\/strong><\/p>\n A great follow up to disaster recovery is Active-Active vs. Active-Passive.\u00a0 In an A\/A scenario, upon a critical failure, downtime is counted in milliseconds to seconds.\u00a0 In A\/A, you typically have an exact replica of your primary production environment in a different data center (we have two POP\u2019s in Seattle for this purpose, in addition to 8 other POP\u2019s around the world).\u00a0 In this case, synchronous replication is in play.<\/p>\n Active-Passive<\/strong><\/p>\n Active-Passive is less complicated than A\/A and less expensive than an A\/A setup, however there is generally more downtime associated with this model and there is also the potential for data loss should a critical failure occur.\u00a0 This option is generally the most cost effective choice and is easy to implement.\u00a0 In this case, asynchronous replication is in play and downtime is usually as long as it normally takes to boot up a system.<\/p>\n What solutions is right for you?<\/strong><\/p>\n Wowrack can help with the assessment of your infrastructure and help with determining what option is best suited for you in addition to what the most cost-effective and efficient way to deploy is.<\/p>\n