Ensuring business continuity

Servers fail, Data centres catch fire, businesses need to continue their operations. Depending on the specific purpose of the storage layer that you are designing one of the methods described below will need to be applied for the purposes of disaster recovery.

Backups

Regular backups would allow recovery of data. Recovery would take time proportional to the volume of data that needs to be recovered and the storage class which is used to store the backup. Cloud providers offer a range of storage tier solutions for backups at different price categories.

Replication

Is a process of incremental copying of the content from primary server to a backup server. This allows an instant failover to the backup server in case of primary server failure. The benefit of the replication approach is that the backup server can be used for read only workloads in certain cases. Replication can be enabled within a single data centre or across separate data centres. In order to maintain reasonable performance across data centres the closest suitable data centre is normally selected for hosting backup replicas.