Storage Replication Software

Storage replication is becoming more popular in the enterprise and if you're already operating in a virtual environment, you have multiple replication solutions to choose from. While SAN products have been offering integrated hardware/software replication solutions for years, virtualization vendors have started integrating this feature into their newer products. VMware, for example, offers a storage replication feature in its newest version of vSphere. If you already have a SAN that supports replication you can choose how you want to replicate. Not a bad idea since VMware’s solution is version 1.0. One of the replication chief benefits is its ability to automate the process of data backup and redundancy.

Restoring your data is as simple as the original storage replication process. You just go online and switch over to the replicated server. Depending on your provider, the complexity of your infrastructure and your comfort level with technology, it may also be possible to set an automatic failover to prevent any customer-facing outage at all. But recovery is as simple as getting online and synchronizing the replicated data to the original server, restoring it to the state of its last backup. You will still have some data loss, the transactions, and records from the intervening period. But if that backup was recent, within the last day or two, the effort required to reconstruct lost transactions and records will be relatively minor.

It's important to understand that storage replication only insures you against hardware failures, and does nothing about the risk of accidental deletion or of your virtualization provider failing to follow best practices. If you have replicated your data, you have a copy of it as it existed at the moment you replicated it. But don't assume that your virtualization provider stores your replicated data at a different data center.