Why Data Replication?

In today's modern business environment, the availability of data is paramount as it is the engine behind critical applications or databases that drive successful IT and business operations. Why? The advent of cheap, high performance disk storage over the last decade has fueled a transformation of many businesses into paperless offices and entirely electronic communications. The majority of relevant and important business information is now kept in the form of digital files.

This online, 24x7x365 digital world demands access to data under any and all circumstances. Traditional backup and recovery methods are effective for many kinds of data loss scenarios. But the major drawback of backup is the relatively long time it takes to restore a large amount of lost data. Moreover, backup is not designed to improve availability of data or provide fast, redundant disaster recovery. The high cost of business interruption plus a new more regulated commercial world is providing the impetus for IT organizations to deploy a layer data protection strategy including redundant disaster recovery.

Contemporary layered data protection approach uses different technologies to provide the appropriate recovery point and recovery time objective on disk and tape depending on the value of the data to the business unit. Backup and recovery remains the mainstay of data protection operations; yet, disk to disk recovery like snapshots and replication are used to improve recovery and availability of data beyond what backup alone can achieve.

Replication comes in many sizes, styles, and types just like blue jeans. Many considerations are necessary when selecting the optimal replication technology and strategy. Considerations as diverse as geography, number of replicas, type of data or application, recovery scenarios, even the type of disaster must be carefully taken into account.

RELDATA TrueReplica software offers the local and remote replication capabilities designed to address disaster recovery and data availability scenarios. Because TrueReplica is based on the foundation of our TrueBlockTM universal IP storage virtualization platform, IT can implement data protection as part of storage provisioning for file systems, relational databases, even email applications.