Introduction
Businesses depend more than ever on information and the applications that provide it. Specific back-office applications have become so critical that an outage of even a few hours can jeopardize an enterprise companys livelihood. To ensure availability remains consistent, regardless of disruptive events. This requirement is often addressed through the deployment of data replication technologies. Data replication is a process that copies data to a remote location either continuously or at defined intervals. This provides a complete copy of production data at a remote location for Disaster Recovery (DR) purposes. This remote location could be a secondary data center or DR provider site.
Implementing a disaster recovery solution was only possible for large incorporates in early days, whereas todays replication solutions make it affordable for most companies to consider replicating. The ultimate goal of data replication is to create a complete copy of the source data.
Data is being transmitted to the remote copy and is not always current it can be a point-in-time snapshots where the data is completely copied to the target storage at predetermined intervals (like end of day or nightly backups). The simplest form of replication is the snapshot. Snapshot technology is considered replication because replication is, essentially, just a copy of datawhich is exactly what a snapshot is. With snapshot technology, data can be replicated with minimal impact on the host application.
Snapshot