Flawless disaster recovery using Stonefly enterprise backup appliance

Replication ensures high availability and disaster recovery. With Stonefly’s enterprise backup appliances, you are capable of restoring data with a single click. The entire process is certified and employed by businesses around the globe and is relied upon to ensure business continuity. Without replication, backup is only half good; backup and replication ensure protection from malware and are a reliable fail safe in case of a natural or man-made disaster.

The initial processes of both backup and replication are the same. Assuming that you are familiar with the backup process, let’s explore how Stonefly and Veeam’s partnership addresses the need for replication.     

How enterprise backup appliances replicate your data

Let’s recall a few things with the backup procedure. We initiate the process by selecting a Virtual Machine (VM) from the hypervisor environment provided by the backup appliance. There are numerous ways of selecting these VMs. Then we perform guest operations and ask for a snapshot while temporarily halting the operating system and operations. Then we use deduplication to compress the data. Up to this point, both backup and replication are exactly the same. Here’s the difference, when doing the backup we write the data in the first repository. For replication, we target from the source to the target proxy. Once we get to the target proxy, we actually write the data. 

Data is deduplicated and compressed but only for transit. However, the backup appliance writes the full data size in the target data storage. Now here, we can see the VMX file (configuration file for a virtual machine) and we can also register that VM in the target location. This copied VM is normally written with a different name, usually with a suffix, making it easier to identify. Once the data is written, we go back to the repository with the snapshot and get rid of it. And just like how it worked for the backup. Any changes, for the same VM, that follow will be incremental.

What the enterprise backup appliance does at the target end is that it actually writes a snapshot tree for our asynchronous replication.  This enables you to have different points in time that you can fail over at the point of a failover. In the configuration of the job, we can orchestrate some changes in the virtual machine and reset the IP of this virtual machine. This is done essentially in the Disaster Recovery infrastructure, which has a different IP range, thus giving it a different IP addressing to allow that to function. We can also change its network identity, so we can change it to V-switch identity. This helps the VM live up well at the other end.

StoneFly DR365™ backup appliance failover strategy

The StoneFly DR365™ backup appliance creates a failover plan, which consists of a list of virtual machines. For instance, consider an ordered list like VM no.1 and VM no.2. We can assign a sixty second wait stat to VM no.1 and VM no.2 can have a hundred and twenty second wait. This means hundred and twenty second wait time to boot. This allows us to get infrastructure objects up first, there may be some database objects but then some client connectivity objects and that really helps with that failover plan.

With the help of on-site replication, you always have data available to switch to in case of a fail over. You also get to have an offsite backup which ensures a faster, secure and reliable backup and disaster recovery. The Stonefly DR365™ enterprise backup appliance provide these and a lot more, which makes them preferable for major companies, organizations and institutions with sensitive data.