Using active-active data centers / centres for business continuity
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- Published: Friday, 02 December 2016 09:15
Huawei and IDC have released a white paper entitled, ‘Active-Active Data Centers Help Enterprises to Safeguard Business Continuity in the Era of Digital Transformation.’
In the shift to cloud computing and centralization of data, stability of data centers / centres has become central to the digital transformation of enterprises, and an increasingly large factor in their business development. CIOs are placing significant attention to active-active data center solutions as they recognize the high level of service continuity made possible through such offerings.
Redundancy at the storage system level is a hugely important element to achieving a truly active-active configuration at the data center. With active-active array solutions, recovery time is no longer an uncertainty as recovery point objectives (RPOs) and recovery time objectives (RTOs) reach the zero mark. Implementing load balancing between the two centers in the active-active makeup improves total cost of ownership (TCO) while delivering impressive improvements in performance and better fulfillment in the high availability requirements for enterprises by ensuring always-on businesses.
The paper also elaborates on the importance of clearly understanding the technical differences in the active-standby and active-active solutions when deciding on a service continuity program.
Active-active solutions fully incorporate disaster recovery (DR) and backup into the build to solve the issues in IT equipment capabilities being inadequate to support the service continuity needs of the customer. Traditional DR schemes use two or multiple centers, but the model is still active-standby and switchover requires manual operations. In the event of a disaster, several hours are often required to recover data. In contrast, active-active emphasizes load sharing and offers automated switching capabilities, drastically improving and even multiplying IT resource utilization and return on investment.
