Organizations are under increasing pressure to ensure continuous operations of their business and are unwilling to tolerate any form of service interruptions to their application and data landscape. With the sheer number of critical and operational applications underpinning the smallest company to the largest enterprise, ensuring applications and data are continuously available and user experiences are unwavering can be a challenge for even the most skilled IT personnel. Not to mention that many applications often need to replicate fast-changing data across multiple data centers or regions. As part of an overall strategy for disaster recovery and disaster avoidance, multi-site data replication ensures that critical and operational applications and data are continuously available, even if one site goes offline.
With the number of applications and data that underpin the smallest company to the largest enterprise growing, ensuring they are continuously available continues to challenge even the most skilled IT personnel. Often, they are forced to rely on traditional disaster recovery strategies to meet these expectations, but that can be (and should be) seen as having a severe impact on your business after a loss of the primary site as applications and data are left unprotected from a subsequent failure. Furthermore, with the high costs of data replication solutions to maintain multiple copies of data that can easily be geographically dispersed compels IT team to be very selective in what applications and datasets are selected multi-sites data protection strategies.
At IBM, we believe that everyone must have access to the data services needed to ensure operational resiliency. With the introduction of immutable data copies stored in logically air-gapped recovery environments, to hardware accelerated inline threat detection, to high availability and regional replications features, IBM continues to focus on features designed to assure the operational resilience and rapid response for application and data stability for any organization. With the FlashSystem portfolio, IBM has released an architectural construct in how all applications and data are protected across multiple sites. This alleviates any situation whereby the IT staff are required to prioritize applications and data for the protection it deserves – we call it Policy Based Multi-Site Replication – and it combines the benefits of metro-high availability links with regional disaster recovery links for cascade-based, star-based, and multi-site replication for continuous operations and availability.
With IBM’s new Policy-Based Multi-Site Replication, organizations benefit from:
- Delivering better SLAs with continuous data protection
- Preventing data loss with more frequent recovery points
- Preventing data corruption and threat proliferation with validated and verified restore points
- Reducing downtime with faster recovery times
- Increasing operational response and ensure workforce productivity with intelligence and automation in the recovery process
As a result, IT teams can:
- Eliminate legacy product proliferation by combining multiple backup and protection capabilities into one simple-to-manage highly availability architecture supported by a regional hub-and-spoke architecture for out-of-area protection and recovery that help to reduce OpEx and CapEx across the business.
- Enjoy rapid restores for critical applications from complex web applications to data lake environments and even traditional applications such as: databases, ERP and CRM systems, virtual environments (and more).
- Maintain data integrity and ensure authorized access with data encryption and integrated security features that prevent intrusion and employ hardware assisted inline anomaly detection as a digital defense mechanism backed with features that ensure recovery operations are from verified and validated restore points.
- Provide data loss avoidance by creating secondary backup copies that can be saved locally or remotely to alternate media for disaster avoidance and recovery.
In Summary, multisite data replication is relevant in today's market because it provides essential support for disaster recovery, global operations, regulatory compliance, and performance optimization, all of which are critical for maintaining a competitive edge in a rapidly evolving technological (and threat) landscape.
Interested in learning more about IBM FlashSystem? Walk through the FlashSystem Virtual Experience for yourself here