Elastic Data Replication is snapshot-based file-to-file and file-to-object replication at the share level for affordable disaster recovery.
Disasters – both natural and human created – are on the rise. Natural events like pandemics and climate events are becoming more frequent and more devastating. Cyberattacks and ransomware threats are increasingly sophisticated, hard to detect, and costly. The year 2023 had the most billion-dollar-plus climate disasters than any other year, costing the U.S. alone an estimated $92 billion, according to NOAA. Additionally, according to the New Relic 2023 Observability Forecast report, the median annual cost of an IT outage has now reached $7.75 million.
Disaster recovery (DR) is no longer just for the most critical. data. IT organizations must find a way to keep an extra copy of all their large volumes of unstructured data for DR purposes.
NAS mirroring is too expensive for growing unstructured data volumes
Replicating huge, growing volumes of unstructured data in an identical mirror (known as NAS mirroring), however, is proving to be too expensive for most organizations. NAS mirroring is commonly used to ensure data can be accessible in the event of a disaster, but it requires identical storage infrastructure offsite. This doubles the cost of the infrastructure. Also, NAS mirroring is at the volume level, so you cannot choose which data to replicate and to where; all shares on the volume, including data and snapshots are replicated.
Paying for an identical replica of infrastructure is often warranted for critical data, but it is hard to justify this expense for non-critical data. For this reason, non-critical data is often left unprotected. Organizations want to pick the right level of replication depending on the nature of unstructured data in each share, without having to make blanket decisions for entire volumes as required by NAS mirroring solutions.
NAS mirroring is synchronous and does not fully protect from ransomware attacks
Another challenge with NAS mirroring is that although it provides near instant recovery, it does not really protect from cyberattacks because changes are propagated to both sites at nearly the same time. While this ensures a near-instantaneous Recovery Point Objective (RPO), its drawback is that a ransomware infection in the primary site will also infect the secondary site.
Komprise offers the ability to asynchronously replicate data at the share level to right-size DR for unstructured data.
Komprise Elastic Data Replication
With the release of Komprise Elastic Replication, Komprise now supports share-level asynchronous data replication capabilities. This is supported by snapshot-based file-to-file, file-to-object and object-to-object migrations.
Komprise Elastic Replication allows IT users to configure replication policies granularly for specific shares or directories and not just at the volume level, delivering the following benefits:
- Customizable RPO: You can define the frequency of replication per share by picking the schedule by which Komprise takes snapshots and copies incremental changes to the secondary site. Therefore, you can pick the appropriate Recovery Point Object (RPO) for each share based on the criticality of that data, for both file-to-file and file-to-object replication.
- Non-identical infrastructure at secondary site: Komprise replicates data without requiring the secondary site to be identical to the primary. You can choose to replicate files from a NAS to any other file or object destination. Now, organizations can use lower-cost object storage at the destination such as the cloud for data that does not need to be recovered within days while using higher-cost file storage at the destination for data which requires a faster recovery.
- Asynchronous replication and support of object-locked destinations help in defense against ransomware: Komprise asynchronously replicates data based on a schedule you can set for each share. This provides a buffer for ransomware infections on the source share to propagate to the destination. Komprise also allows you to replicate file or object data to object-locked destinations. This offers additional protection as even if newer versions of copies are infected, you can recover from older versions.
- Policies configurable for each share: You no longer have to mirror an entire volume. Komprise enables you to pick which shares you want to replicate, to where, and on what schedule. You can configure different policies for different shares in the same volume.
- Full file fidelity: Komprise retains the file metadata even when replicating to an object share, delivering full file fidelity when restoring from the object share for NFS data and NTFS-level fidelity for SMB data.
Komprise Share-based Replication saves 70%+ over NAS Mirror
Assume you have a source volume with X amount of data and a typical snapshot overhead of 30%. With synchronous NAS mirroring, this would create 1.3X of footprint. Now, assuming the following profile of data/shares on the volume, you can see that Komprise Elastic Replication creates over 70% savings. Customers can still recover data as files, with a higher RPO for the shares that need it and lower RPO via object storage for the shares that are less critical.
Right-sizing DR makes protecting unstructured data affordable and tenable
The right DR strategy is becoming more critical as disasters are on the rise. The threat of cyberattacks requires asynchronous approaches to replication. NAS mirroring provides nearly instant recovery, which is excellent for critical data but an overkill with high expense for most unstructured data. Komprise now gives customers a simple way to configure their replication destination, schedule, and costs per share. This allows organizations to right-size DR and maintain the most cost-effective DR strategy as unstructured data continues to grow.
Additional Winter 2024 Updates
Other highlights of the Komprise Intelligent Data Management Winter 2024 update include:
- Customizable Report Templates: Komprise now allows users to save custom report configurations and maintain multiple versions of any type of report. For example, a Showback Report can be created for each department or business unit within an organization. Learn more about Komprise Reports.
- Pure Storage: Building on the transparent data tiering between FlashBlade//S and FlashBlade//E, Komprise now supports FlashBlade object storage as an on-premises Plan Target. Read the Pure transparent tiering white paper.
- VAST Data Platform (S3) supported as Plan target.
