Reality isn’t always what it seems, as we learned in the groundbreaking film The Matrix.
Neo, the movie’s hero, learns this lesson from a young monk who holds a spoon that bends and twists on its own, as if by magic.
“Do not try and bend the spoon,” the boy tells Neo. “That’s impossible. Instead only try to realize the truth.”
The truth, the boy says, is that there is no spoon.
With knowledge of the Matrix—or the virtual world—Neo learned that it’s all about perception.
Fifteen years after The Matrix, the physical world we live in and the virtual world are deeply intertwined—and a crisis in a virtual space can have very real consequences.
Eighty-three percent of IT professionals said in the event of data loss, their companies have no disaster recovery plan or they lack total confidence in what’s in place, according to Vision Solutions’ 2013 State of Resilience Report.
But with knowledge of software-based, byte-level replication, organizations can change the way they perceive high availability and disaster recovery (HA/DR).
Software-based replication eliminates anxiety and ensures that every bit of data is protected and retrievable, regardless of the challenge, on any platform, in any combination of physical, virtual or cloud servers.
More than 80% of companies still rely on tape backup and offsite storage, even though tape delivers slower recovery times amid greater operational complexity. Tape is also vulnerable to problems very much tied to the physical world—heat, light and dust.
Traditional recovery strategies rely on snapshots to preserve data—but the data is only as good as the latest snapshot. A retail business, for example, may collect thousands of transactions over the course of a day. Hospitals accumulate patient records second by second that are used to make life or death decisions. If a server crashes, it could lose all of the organization’s most recent data.
Nearly 40% of companies said they’ve experienced data loss due to disaster, server failure, application failure or human error, the survey reported. The damage was significant—almost half of those respondents had lost a day or more of data.
In the wake of such a catastrophe, companies lose time, money and trust.
If you want to truly recover your environment, you don’t want to lose any data—it doesn’t make sense to say, “I have 99% of my data, so I’m good.” It’s got to be 100%, so companies need to be 100% protected. Even one fragment of missing data could lead to a huge financial cost, provoke a lawsuit or, in the case of a hospital, prove dire for a patient.
Organizations that use real-time byte-level replication can simply switch over to an identical environment and pick up where the first one failed. The solution works faster than traditional methods because it doesn’t repetitively capture all the data with each snapshot. It only updates what’s new, building a comprehensive record of every byte, so companies can be up and running quickly with their data intact.
Because of the complexity of data centers today, given the amount of data available from business development and with increasing options for acquiring data, it is imperative to have an HA/DR solution that is flexible enough to run across any platform, operating system or environment—not just from like system, so that your solutions for data protection can grow and evolve as your company does. With companies’ data requirements becoming only more demanding moving forward, solutions need to be implemented in a straightforward way that’s tailored to the company’s operations—large or small. Being confident that the data is continually protected in any scenario or within any environment is a necessity for business stability.
Business demands that the solutions coexist with the company’s environment and have total awareness of what’s going on. When they detect a problem, they know where the organization lost its operating system or server and have already captured the most recent information. Recovery can begin the second they move to another environment.
Real-time replication solutions are now proven in the marketplace, having demonstrated how it makes data protection less complicated. Fifty-three percent of companies had implemented the solution by 2013, up from 35% in 2013, according to the Vision survey.
With the right solution in place, disaster recovery actually becomes quite simple.
The Matrix is all about the virtual world—one that is parallel to the world in which we live. Software-based replication creates a parallel virtual world for your most precious data.
Once you realize that truth, you’ll understand that just as there is no spoon, there is no stress with HA/DR.