High availability, data replication, and backup are integral to avoiding costly downtimes and loss of data. In this episode of TFiR Let’s Talk, Swapnil Bhartiya sits down with Philip Merry, Software Engineer at SIOS Technology, to discuss high availability and backup strategy and how SIOS DataKeeper and LifeKeeper ensure applications are protected and the data is secure. He goes on to discuss how SIOS’ solutions lower recovery time objective (RTO) and recovery point objective (RPO) to ensure everything is back up and running in as short a time as possible after a failure.

Key highlights from this video interview are:

• High availability consists of two parts: keeping applications running and the data ready. Merry likens it to having a primary and secondary system whereby the primary system can take all of its data and copy it over to the secondary system so that it has a backup.
• Hot backups can be defined as any backup that is connected to power or mounted on a system. A cold backup is any backup on unpowered media, such as a thumb drive.
• Merry discusses the trade-off with the hot backup being connected to a system where a failure could occur while a cold backup is safer but needs time to connect to a system and copy over the files.
• SIOS Data Replication (DR) is done with Data Keeper which ensures data stays up to date and accessible across all the systems. Merry discusses the three-to-one backup rule, making sure you have three copies of the data across two different forms of media and at least one offsite. He explains that the cold and hot backups already discussed could be teamed with a routine backup from your cloud provider for this approach.
• The recovery point objective (RPO) is how much data an organization can stand to lose in case of failure and the recovery time objective (RTO) is how much time the organization has between a failure occurring and bringing things back up and running. Merry explains how SIOS DataKeeper lowers RPO and RTO with synchronous replication and how LifeKeeper ensures the RTO is as short as possible.
• According to Merry, clustering and replication are two sides of the same coin. He explains replication with DataKeeper makes data present on the primary and secondary sides of the cluster. Clustering with LifeKeeper, on the other hand, ensures there is an automatic mediator to substitute and a backup system if a failure were to occur. He discusses how these work together to make sure the application is protected.

Connect with Philip Merry (LinkedIn)
Learn more about SIOS Technology (Twitter)

The summary of the show is written by Emily Nicholls.