Offsite Data Replication with Automatic Fail over

File servers and application servers keep your organization going, providing infrastructure for your critical business processes and reference materials your people need to do their jobs. Failure of critical servers, for any length of time, can result in severe losses in productivity and financial health.

No matter how well you maintain your technology infrastructure, its safety cannot be guaranteed if it only resides at a single location. Disaster may strike at any moment. A WAN-enabled solution, capable of safeguarding your application servers at multiple locations is the only effective way of countering these challenges.

DataGuardian (DG) Replication is a managed service - “Replication as a Service” - delivered by IPR utilizing industry proven software from CA.  DG Replication provides cost-effective disaster recovery capabilities for file servers and other applications on 32- and 64-bit Windows, Linux, AIX and Solaris servers.

Over a WAN, VPN, or direct connection, DataGuardian Replication replicates from a production server at the client site to a replica server at an IPR Data center providing rapid data recovery and continuous data protection as a guard against data corruption. 

When disaster strikes, anything that puts a stop to your ability to do business is a disaster. It is critical that your response is urgent and effective. Whether a flood or a blackout, or the more probable virus attack or user error, you must recovery quickly with minimal data loss or risk losing productivity, revenue, customers and opportunities, perhaps even the viability of your entire business.

Disaster Recovery

DataGuardian Replication synchronizes and continuously replicates files, databases and entire application servers to a secure IPR Data center providing an off-site disaster recovery copy of critical data with an RPO measured in seconds.

• Continuous data protection for recovery from data corrupted by virus or user or application error
• Data changes transferred as they occur to a standby replica server at IPR Data center
• Replication of all file data and metadata, including ACLs and Unix/Linux permissions
• Tailored, data replication for critical applications including Exchange, SQL, Oracle, and IIS
• Simple installation with no application or user downtime, automated remote installation, and wizard-driven creation of new DR scenarios
• Auto-discovery of application components and auto-configuration of appropriate settings means minimal administrator time to configure your high availability solution
• Supports bandwidth throttling at a constant level or varying according to a specified schedule

High Availability (HA)

DataGuardian ReplicationHA offers a superset of the capabilities of DG Replication.  In particular, it adds the capability for automatic or push-button fail over of clients from the production server to a secondary replica server, without any need to reconfigure clients, as well as the ability to automatically monitor the status of the production server and the applications running on it. With DG ReplicationHA, both RPO and RTO are near zero. 

• Automatic (or manual) fail over in seconds to minutes, including critical Exchange, SQL, Oracle, & IIS applications
• Push-button or auto-triggered automatic fail over of all users to a standby server at an IPR data center, without any need to reconfigure end users
• Seamless fail over back to the original server when ready
• Monitoring of your production application, including both server availability and the state of application services

Continuous Data Protection (CDP)

Both DataGuardian Replication and ReplicationHA have built in CDP technology allowing for immediate restoration of data to the point just before a corruption, user or application error. Suppose a user accidentally deleted a file.  Like all replication solutions, the file on the replica server is also deleted.  However, DG Replication CDP technology provides rewind snapshots– go back seconds, minutes, hours – providing continuous recovery points throughout the day.  No need to restore an entire backup volume.

Click for a Demo

Why not just use Exchange 2007 built in features?

(Nelson Ruest & Danielle Ruest, Resolutions Enterprises)

Several reasons: While traditional high-availability systems provide an excellent way to extend services on a 24x7 basis, they do have limitations. Microsoft’s new solutions are either limited to a single location or, in the case of MNS, they’re limited to only two locations. Third-party replication tools do not have this limitation. In addition, Microsoft’s version of continuous replication is completely different from that of other vendors and puts a bigger strain on storage hardware—not so with third-party driver based solutions.

In fact, third-party replication solutions may offer the following features:

• No limitation in the number of replication partners or locations. You can even create a centralized disaster recovery or backup center by linking all remote source servers to one central location.
• Delta compression replication engines, bandwidth throttling and WAN optimized protocols help control wide area network (WAN) usage.
• Protection against data corruption through snapshots or true continuous data protection (CDP) technology.
• Automatic client redirection in the case of a failure without requiring complex geographic VLAN solutions because these solutions rely on simple DNS redirection. Essentially, third-party solutions can use existing network infrastructure and failover across subnets.
• Application-aware monitoring, storage group and store auto-discovery and auto-configuration in addition to automatic or pushbutton failover and failback.
• Automated disaster recovery testing in real time without disrupting either users or replication between partner servers.

Replication can be between clustered partners or from clustered partners to non-clustered servers or even virtual machines. This means existing cluster investments can be retained while adding offsite business continuity capabilities.

Third-party tools may also provide the capability to test, validate, and report on the recoverability of the replica environment by actually starting up application services and performing required operations to verify the integrity of the data, including updates to the database, without stopping replication, or disrupting users.

In addition, unlike Microsoft’s LCR or CCR, built-in CDP lets you recover from data corruption episodes by “rewinding” individual files, individual databases or the entire protected dataset to any point in the past, before the corruption occurred, regardless of the size of the data set. For Exchange especially, you need to look for products that expose backup and other significant application-specific events—such as checkpoints or log rotations—in order to revert back to points in time at which the database is known to be in a consistent state. These solutions are able to recover from a much broader array of failure types than simple log file replay, and do it much faster.

What is more important is the impact on I/O. Third-party replication solutions rely on an agent or driver that captures data as it is written to disk in the source location and automatically sends it to the target location(s). This means that unlike Microsoft’s solution, which adds log disk I/O, third-party tools do not impact hardware any more than previous versions of Exchange (see Figure 4); you can continue to use existing hardware without having to change configurations or RAID levels.

Finally, you can rely on third-party replication tools to help eliminate backup windows because all backups can reliably be performed from the replica copies. This mitigates the risk and costs associated with transporting backup media to an offsite location or maintaining adequate IT staff at multiple branch locations, hence the concept of a centralized disaster recovery center.

Online Backup

IPR DataGuardian Online Backup provides the same off-site data protection and managed service benefits of DG Replication. The major difference is DG Online Backup is suitable for data and applications with less stringent RPO and RTO requirements.

DataGuardian Replication and ReplicationHA are powered by CA XOsoft