Data Replication

What Is Data Replication?

Data replication is the process of copying and storing data in multiple locations to improve data availability and accessibility across a network. The result is a distributed environment that enables local users to access the data they need faster, and without disrupting other users.

Data replication is a key component of disaster recovery (DR) strategies, as it makes sure an accurate and up-to-date copy of data always exists in case of a system failure, cybersecurity breach, or other disaster—whether naturally occurring or through human error.

Copies of replicated data can be stored within the same system, in onsite or off-site servers, or in multiple clouds.

Why Is Data Replication Important?

Data replication is key to business resiliency because data drives decision-making. It feeds into and informs mission-critical processes, analytics, systems, and—ultimately—business insights. You want to ensure that it is always available and accessible to users in as close to real-time as possible. Data replication can help you achieve this.

These are just some of the many benefits of a strategic approach to data replication:

• Ensure business continuity and disaster recovery (BCDR) – By copying your data and storing it across multiple machines, you are assured that an up-to-date version will always be available no matter what hardware malfunction, ransomware attack, or other disaster occurs
• Improve app and data performance – By storing your data in multiple places, you can reduce latency since the data is located closer to the user or where the transaction is occurring—even if it’s at the very edge of the network
• Enhance analytics capabilities – When you replicate data to a shared system such as a data warehouse or to the cloud, analysts working from anywhere can collaborate on projects to power more accurate business intelligence, faster

What Are the Types of Data Replication?

Organizations often put in place data replication in Oracle, data replication in SQL Server, or data replication in MySQL strategies to mitigate downtime risk.

Common types of data replication include:

• Snapshot replication – Like a picture, this is a single point in time replication
• Transactional replication – You get a full copy of the data and are continually sent updates every time they happen, in the order they happen, in real time
• Merge or heterogeneous replication – This type of replication happens when two or more data sources are combined into one singular source

What Is the Difference Between Synchronous and Asynchronous Replication?

Synchronous Replication

Data is copied to a secondary site as new data is written or updated on the primary site. Multiple sites thereby have current copies of the data, which enables rapid failover-based disaster recovery.

With synchronous replication, data is written first to the primary site array and then immediately to the secondary site array. The writes are considered completed only after the host receives acknowledgement that the write process completed on the arrays at both sites. While synchronous replication ensures little-to-no discrepancy between the data on the primary and secondary sites, the process may tax overall performance and may also be negatively impacted if the distance between the primary and secondary sites is significant.

Asynchronous Replication

Data is written to the primary site and then replicated periodically to a secondary site, which may occur hourly, daily, or weekly. When the secondary site has been updated, an acknowledgement is sent to the primary site.

Since data is written asynchronously, users can schedule replication at times when network performance will be least impacted. The secondary site can be used for disaster recovery with the understanding that the primary and secondary sites may not be fully synchronized.

What Are Data Replication Tools?

Tools organizations use for data replication help reduce risk because they rapidly create a copy of data in a different location than the original source data’s location. Multicloud data management and data replication software such as Cohesity simplifies the management of replication policies across many data sources and targets on-premises and in the cloud.

What Is Data Replication in Storage?

To mitigate downtime risk, a storage replication solution, service, or tool delivers additional redundancy should a primary storage backup system fail.

What Is Data Replication in DBMS?

Database replication, or DBMS replication, involves the regular copying of data from one database to another, for example, data replication in SQL Server, MySQL or Oracle, so all users have access to the same data. This can be a one-time or a many-time occurrence, depending on the organization’s data management policies and role-based access. Most often, database replication is completed for disaster recovery or business continuity purposes so that in the event of downtime, data can be quickly recovered.

Can Data be Replicated Across Availability Zones?

Yes. Organizations can perform data replication to maintain a synchronous standby copy of data in a different availability zone.

What Is Data Replication in SAP?

Within SAP HANA, data replication can be used to migrate data from source systems to SAP HANA databases. This can be done through the console or by using HANA studio.

What are Data Replication Techniques?

The three most popular data replication techniques are:

• Full-table replication – The process of copying everything from the data storage source to another source (e.g., every existing, new, and updated row)
• Key-based incremental replication – The process of scanning keys or indexes to see what’s changed and then copying only what’s different
• Log-based incremental replication – During this process, software scans the log files of the source to determine what has changed and then makes only those changes in the source copy

How Cohesity Simplifies Data Replication

Many businesses today still depend on multiple different products to replicate data. This reliance on a patchwork of legacy products creates a complex environment that is difficult to manage. Increased complexity means more downtime, more latency, more lost data, and increased total cost of ownership (TCO).

Moreover, mass data fragmentation and disconnected architectures are incapable of meeting 24/7 operational requirements.

Cohesity is committed to simplifying complex data replication processes, and supporting organizations developing strategies to meet strict criteria. With the Cohesity data management platform, you can:

• Protect data from accidentally deleted files, application crashes, data corruption, and viruses
• Enable fast, low-latency access to individual files and applications
• Provide off-site data protection and enable reliable disaster recovery
• Seamlessly scale to meet needs as data stores grow
• Easily establish policies for backup schedules, service level agreements (SLAs), and other data replication parameters

Cohesity delivers the only hyperscale, converged platform that eliminates the complexity of traditional data replication by unifying end-to-end data protection infrastructure. This includes target storage, backup, DR, and cloud tiering in addition to replication.

Driving innovation, Cohesity combines the advantages of global deduplication, scale-out architecture, unified data protection, and native cloud integration. The result: Cohesity can deliver very fast SLAs while simplifying your end-to-end data replication—and even your complete data management—environment at lower TCO.