In this blog post I discuss backup and replication technologies, the purposes of both, what I recommend using and how some vendors are bundling the two functions when not necessarily needed.
The purposes of backup and replication often become blurred due to misuse or misunderstanding of the terms. I appreciate at this point I'm teaching many of you how to suck eggs but bare with me, I promise it gets interesting!
A backup is a point in time copy of data that enables recovery in a data loss event and also the ability to recover from an earlier point in time so in the event data is changed or becomes corrupted it can be recovered. Typically backup is enabled via a software product or dedicated hardware appliance.
Replication can be a real time or point in time replica of data. In the event of data loss or corruption, data can quickly be brought back online via the replica. Replication if correctly implemented enables a quicker recovery time objective than backup and lower recovery point objective if real time replication is configured. Typically replication is enabled via a software product, built-in application capabilities or via built-in storage mirroring capabilities.
A common question I get from executives is so why do I need both?
The answer to this depends on the regulatory requirements of the business and sector you work in and also the required recovery time objective and recovery point objective of your business. However, in the majority of environments businesses use a combination of backup and replication technologies to provide a comprehensive business continuity plan.
The average cost of outages as detailed via IDC for the Fortune 1000 is $100,000 per hour with the average total cost of unplanned application downtime per year being $1.25 to $2.5 billion! This proves data is the lifeblood of organisations and outages these days have a very high cost to businesses. Therefore ensuring you have a real time replica of data with a tested low recovery point and recovery time objective is crucial.
Point in time replicas or backup is then used to enable the longer retention of data so businesses can recover back over a longer period in time with a lower storage and cost footprint than replication. This is required for a number of scenarios including the event of data being manually deleted via user error, data is corrupted and not noticed for a period of time, they ensure regulatory requirements are met or data has been hit via ransomware and replicated.
Both technologies are delivering SLAs to the business.
