Data replication

What is data replication?

The demand for data availability and protection is greater than ever. For data-driven organizations, the key foundational element is data availability, which highlights the need for data replication. Snapshot backups are relatively inexpensive and give your organization some protection against losing data, but backups can be slow to recover from and may not offer the granularity the organization needs for a full recovery. Data replication is the better technology that answers today’s needs:

• Rapidly evolving demands for IT modernization
• Digital transformation
• An always-on business experience

Appliance-based replication uses an external physical appliance and runs the replication code directly on that appliance. This type of replication is hardware-based and specific to a single platform. Appliance-based replication is often not suitable for cloud strategies as it requires additional hardware at both locations.

Appliance-based replication takes local copies or backups of the data and stores them on the local appliance. It then runs a periodic task to copy the data to a secondary appliance, often located at another site. This process can result in large gaps between replication jobs, meaning large gaps in the data sets which could lead to longer than desired RPOs.

Array-based replication is a type of data replication that is performed at the physical or virtual storage array level and doesn’t rely on hypervisor snapshots. Array-based replication products are provided by a specific storage vendor. Because they are single-vendor solutions, these products are only compatible with that specific storage solution.

When it comes to protecting virtual environments, both appliance-based and array-based options have similar disadvantages:

• Appliance-based replication copies physical entities rather than virtual entities, making the copies oblivious to configuration changes. 
• Business continuity plans quickly become outdated because they can’t keep up with the current production environment. 
• Appliance-based replication lacks granularity, which conflicts with the requirements—and the advantages—of virtualization.
• Appliance-based replication requires dual points of management (the physical management console and the virtualization management console), and the constant coordination greatly increases management complexity. 

A hypervisor is a software-based operating platform that hosts and runs virtual machines and their virtual disks. Hypervisor-based replication is software that is integrated directly with hypervisor software to replicate virtual machines and virtual disks to another hypervisor or other storage location.

A hypervisor is a software-based operating platform that hosts and runs virtual machines and their virtual disks. Hypervisor-based replication is software that is integrated directly with hypervisor software to replicate virtual machines and virtual disks to another hypervisor or other storage location.

Virtualization offers extraordinary capabilities and benefits, but your organization can’t fully embrace them unless—or until—other technologies evolve to enable them. Managing a virtual or hybrid environment while using older replication technologies that use snapshots or storage-layer backup makes it harder to fully leverage the benefits of virtualization and inhibits the move to the cloud.

Hypervisor-based replication like HPE Zerto’s can monitor changes to virtual machines and virtual disks to provide continuous, journal-based replication with zero impact on application performance. Hypervisor-based replication is also fully agnostic to storage types at the source and destination, natively supporting all storage platforms and the full breadth of capabilities made possible by virtualization. And it integrates seamlessly into your existing infrastructure.