What is Regional Storage Redundancy?

When looking at different formats of storage, it’s important to take into account how data being stored needs to have the ability to survive a disaster.

– Whether this is failure of an update, a corrupt drive or failure of hardware with no ability to retrieve.

– One always needs to think of what can be done to restore data if the current source no longer exists.

– Source can be simply a failed drive, or a complete failure or destruction of the facility in which the storage exists.

Should any of these options happen then how does one restore data and bring a service back online?

– If a back-up copy only existed within same server or facility if destroyed then this backup is no longer available.

– Backup within one location is susceptible to failures like this, it’s only within one location and not isolated.

– When backups are stored externally at a geographically distant location then single failures are less likely to happen.

With Backups in Geographically separated locations from the source server and data center:

– One can then spin up another source and restore data to begin bringing services online.

– This can be simple for basic services, but still requires updating items like IP’s, Domains and more with complex setups.

When Redundancy is built into planning and building of the Solution:

– Storage becomes a built-in part of the overall Solution, where backups are storage across multiple geographically separated Data Centers.

– Items like IP’s can move between locations within the same region, a region is typically located within a city but with a set distance between each other.

– Typically these separated Data Centers are in the range of 20+ miles between, helping to isolate weather events(tornado, floods…etc) as well.

– All items like power, fiber, backup power, building….etc are all independent for each location.

– Should a zone be completely destroyed, other zones are not impacted as each building is distant from each other.

Regional Storage Redundancy takes advantage of multiple Data Center Zones within a region:

– Multi Zones within a Region allow IP’s to seamlessly move and become available within new zone deployment.

– Using same IP’s allow for a much easier restore of services assigned to a single or multi IP’s.

– With a copy of storage available across multiple zones, one can restore to a new source in another zone while retaining all previous configuration.

– Using a Zone within the same region makes restoring much easier by being a mirror of the Storage previous setup.

One of the long time standards prior to Online or Cloud Storage – was that one never keeps a backup copy in the same location as their home or office.  While Cloud back up has made this much easier to move data off-site, sometimes there is complacency in not knowing if your backup copy of stored in another location than your source data.  It’s one question that’s very important to know the answer, as when disaster happens it’s crucial to know how to get access to your storage.

Within LoneSync Solutions, multi-zone an multi-region methods are used across the board of each deployment. 

– Running Storage is maintained across multiple servers for fault tolerance of hardware, allowing services to continue running without downtime.

– Snapshot Backups are stored across multi-zones to allow for both seamless fail-over and restore should there be any problem with a fail-over scenario.

– Backups are also stored in another region with it’s own zones, allowing for restoring and spinning up in a new region should this option be required.

When looking over your current Storage Strategy, see if the answers you have are sufficient for what you need now and in the future.  If there are questions, try to zone in on certain aspects and iron out with answers to know you are doing all you can to help eliminate failures that just might have been prevented.  Storage over time has allot of little details and changes, many times over a few years are more than one can remember or count.  Only when this data disappears does one realize just how value it really was and taking the time to protect would’ve been a small cost over what is now lost.