Synchronous Replication: Game, Set, Data Match

The headache and stress of losing data is indescribable. And any outage, whether on premise or cloud, puts storage architectures in the spotlight.

Avoiding such a scenario is always better than scrambling for a cure when it happens. Imagine organisations not being able to access their data for minutes and even hours?

The financial implications are huge. And so, it is advantageous to have copies of data and not only the original.

A prevention technology in case of failures is synchronous replication, which is the process of copying data over a storage area network, local area network or wide area network so there are multiple, up-to-date copies of the data.

According to TechTarget, “The primary difference between synchronous replication and asynchronous replication is the way in which data is written to the replica. Most synchronous replication products write data to primary storage and the replica simultaneously. As such, the primary copy and the replica should always remain synchronised.

“In contrast, asynchronous replication products write data to the primary storage first and then copy the data to the replica. Although the replication process may occur in near real-time, it is more common for replication to occur on a scheduled basis. For instance, write operations may be transmitted to the replica in batches on a periodic basis (for example, every five minutes).”

“Synchronous replication used to be seen as the more expensive, and more hardware and bandwidth intensive as opposed to asynchronous replication,” said Anton Jacobsz, managing director at value-added African distributor, Networks Unlimited.

“Yet, innovations in synchronous replication have brought to market a way for enterprise customers to simplify their infrastructure with unsurpassed space savings and cost efficiencies.”

He said that to ensure peace of mind for its local enterprise clients’ mission critical applications, Networks Unlimited has added Tintri’s Synchronous Replication to its data protection and disaster recovery service.

“Many of today’s businesses have multiple data centres and also back up to the cloud. This makes the recovery of mission critical virtualised and cloud applications critical. In the past only those with the largest IT staff complement and budget could afford synchronous replication. Tintri’s solution is however made for every organisation and every application – it is cost-effective, simple to set up, requires no addition hardware, boasts a one-click failover, and makes zero data loss attainable.”