Advance Your SLAs into “Active” Mode: Infinidat Replication Technologies for Business Continuity

Planning for a data center level incident, such as a natural disaster, a power outage or planned downtime, and ensuring business continuity are critical for all enterprises. It is not just merely copying the data and recovering from a remote copy anymore; you want to be sure that your business can sustain unforeseen events or a planned data center downtime and continue operations from a remote site transparently and non-disruptively.  

As such, you need to fully separate the fault domains, having two or more data centers in different locations and leveraging replication technologies as part of a cyber resilient, enterprise business continuity strategy. 

In our business-driven world, the business drives the SLAs. Specifically, these “SLAs” in storage include recovery point objectives (RPO) and recovery time objectives (RTO). Each organization has its own needs, and these needs will vary based on the business value of the thousands to hundreds of thousands of data sets in your organization. To optimize your use of enterprise storage, you need to understand the full range of SLAs and match them to your business requirements.  

The lowest level of SLA is Asynchronous in which the RPO and RTO are greater than zero. For Asynchronous replication based on InfiniSnap, Infinidat can provide an RPO as low as 4 seconds, given sufficient bandwidth. 

Infinidat prides itself on how close we are to an RPO of zero – so close to Synchronous replication, yet without having to comply with the stringent networking demands of Synchronous. There is zero performance penalty, while quickly recovering using re-writable snaps. There is also no limit on the latency of the wire, so you could have one data center in the U.S. and a second one in Australia, but you will still get 4 second replication. 

The next level up is Synchronous in which the RPO is zero, but the RTO is greater than zero, so you won’t lose a single byte of data. Synchronous replication is a direct replication of source to target. This means once a host submits an I/O to the source system on the local side, that data is replicated immediately over to the target system. It provides RPO at zero. 

Infinidat has invested significant effort to make it efficient. The capabilities are native to the Infinidat system, and dramatically reduce replica overhead. Infinidat’s technology also allows the transition from Sync to Async – and back – automatically in case of issues, adding to the intelligence of the Infinidat platform.

If you want full end-to-end protection with no downtime for applications and services, Active-Active is the next step up in SLA with both RPO and RTO equaling zero, providing a complete business continuity storage infrastructure. In Active-Active, you have 2 systems that are synchronously replicating the data between them, but the host sees both sides of the replica as a single volume. 

This means that, from the host perspective, it can read and write to both sides in parallel and can switch between both. Both sides of the replica in the Infinidat implementation are active and equal. Active-Active is based on Synchronous replication, meaning that it gains all the advantages of Sync. No dedicated hardware is needed, and everything you need is native in the system. 

To top all three options, Infinidat has a concurrent, multi-site replication scheme (Active-Active-Async), which has the ability to take an Active-Active cluster and extend that by adding an additional Asynchronous third and fourth site over a remote location across any distance/latency without any performance penalty. In brief, concurrent multi-site replication improves business continuity where distance matters, while enabling non-disruptive data center testing.

Infinidat replication technology is built on common building blocks which provide stability and performance that is unparalleled. Our company has hundreds of years of enterprise storage engineering experience to solve age-old problems with disaster recovery and business continuity. The uncompromised availability of InfiniBox supports the full range of SLAs with a no-single-point-of-failure architecture, featuring triple redundant controllers working in an Active-Active-Active configuration that allows us to provide 100% availability solutions. 

Furthermore, the entire replication stack is native to the system, meaning no additional hardware or software is needed to meet any desired SLA, and with Infinidat’s all-inclusive licensing, you have the flexibility to choose the right models to meet your business needs without having to worry about additional software costs or lengthy procurement processes.

To see a demo of the Infinidat replication capabilities and learn more about how Infinidat replication technologies can help you with disaster recovery and business continuity, click here to watch an educational webinar.