In today's dynamic business environment, it is quite apparent that business
continuity requirements are changing by the day. While trying to address these
needs enterprises must respond to new business drivers. The challenge is to
reduce risk and increase business resilience, while also reducing costs and
increasing efficiency.
While the need for business continuity is universal for all organisations,
the degree of resilience depends upon various aspects. For instance, in many
industries and geographies, government regulations require companies to have
effective business continuity plans that will enable them to protect information
assets and maintain their service capabilities, in spite of local or regional
disaster. The most commonly regulated industries likely to adopt out-of-region
strategies worldwide include telecom, transportation, banking and other
financial services, government, utilities, healthcare, and e-commerce.
Other factors that are crucial to charting out business continuity plans
include data replication with guaranteed integrity and consistency, scope of
definition of data that needs replication, better RTO (Recovery Time Objective)
and RPO (Recovery Point Objective).
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And, companies quite often have to meet these requirements under the
constraints of cost reductions and increased efficiencies. In order to meet
this, the most commonly followed method is popularly known as storage
consolidation. A consolidated platform requires a greater degree of data
protection and disaster resilience. Most data replication and business
continuity solutions can use remote replication capabilities for data protection
but these replication solutions themselves may consume scarce resources that
could affect performance of applications.
The introduction of disk based replication systems has provided remote
replication a positive fillip-by significantly improving RTO and RPO.
Currently, there are two types of replication strategies adopted by
organizations: synchronous replication for local disasters and asynchronous
replication for regional disasters.
Remote replication processes can cause significant bandwidth problems leading
to momentary link failures, giving rise to situations which can lead to a
painstaking and costly recovery process. While both synchronous and asynchronous
remote replication processes can co-exist within an organisation, existing
solutions require storage for multiple copies of the data, as well as complex
management and scripting.
In such a situation, a replication strategy that uses a disk-based journaling
and a pull-based replication engine to reduce resource consumption and costs,
while increasing performance and operational resilience, may turn out to be the
best bet.
Coupled with disk-based journaling strategy, use of a pull-based replication
process can create one of the most effective remote replication solutions. As
compared to traditional method of the primary storage system, dedicating
resources to push data across the replication link, this kind of an approach
would have a remote replication engine pull the data from the primary storage
system's journal volume across the link, and write it to the journal volume at
the receiving site.
There are many benefits that can be gained through such an approach to remote
replication. By using local disk-based journaling and a pull-based remote
replication engine, the solution releases critical resources that are consumed
by other asynchronous replication approaches at the primary site, such as disk
array cache in storage-based solutions, or server memory in host-based software
approaches. This kind of a solution improves cache utilization, lowering costs
and improving performance of production transaction applications. It also
maximizes the use of bandwidth by better handling the variations of the
replication network resources.
Lim Beng Lay, product manager
Asia-South, Hitachi Data Systems