Data Replication – Best Disaster Recovery Plan GuruSquad

Data Replication – Best Disaster Recovery Plan

Data (files and folders) on servers have grown exponentially in the last 10 to 15 years. An office with 150 users would have an average data of 250 to 400 GB back around the year 2000. Nowadays, an office of 150 users could easily average 1.5 to 2TB worth of data. This has of course contributed to many reasons such as higher resolution graphics, more reliance on digital forms, departments and companies wanting to go completely paperless.

This is of course considered to be great progress into the digital age but this also brings its own challenges to IT departments. Systems administrators now need to back up more data than they ever had before which possible given they have all the necessary hardware equipment. What becomes the real challenge is the time it takes to back up the data and most importantly how long it would take to restore it.

It is not uncommon to see an office of 500 employees with 15 TB of data. The fear is if their SAN or network shares go offline due to hardware or data corruption, then it could take a week or more to bring this data restored. This of course may not be “acceptable” or even affordable by management. Many companies have lost customers and business because of similar outages. We are certainly not prune to that.

GuruSquad has assisted many businesses and government agencies worldwide to overcome these scenarios with the use of GS RichCopy 360 Enterprise. Given storage is now very cheap and affordable, businesses (of all sizes) can now stand up another “server or NAS” and replicate their data to standby shares. This reduces the downtime to minutes instead of days or even weeks to recover from a disastrous outage. As soon as an outage is declared, system administrators can quickly reroute the users to access the stand by shares while they work on bringing their main servers up and running. In the past such scenarios were not possible due to the high cost of storage hardware, but nowadays this has become one of the most affordable components in terms of hardware.

Disaster recovery became a huge focus  to most businesses and IT professionals since the tragedy of September 11, 2001. When the two twin world trade center towers collapsed, many businesses lost their servers and data centers. Some of these businesses were able to get full recovery of their data due to off-site data replication whereas others were not as fortunate as they did not have data replication as part of their disaster recovery plan.

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