All of the core components of your data center are important, but your storage is one of the most critical elements. A storage failure can be extremely costly and even catastrophic for your business. This is why you need a robust storage solution to protect your biggest investments.
All too often, businesses lose valuable information like customer records and contact details just because they have a single point of failure. But when you have your data on multiple sites, the chances of all-out data unavailability are reduced significantly. This is known as multi-site replication.
With multi-site replication implemented, your data is replicated in two separate locations, making it possible for you to restore your critical files from either site with very minimal downtime.
Redundant components are an essential part of a high availability strategy. Redundant components like power supplies prevent downtime in a hardware failure, but it also helps keep your Network Attached Storage data safe from disasters.
Configuring drives in RAID is an excellent way to have copies of your data if one of the drives fails. The most popular RAID level for this purpose is RAID-6. RAID-6 writes two parity blocks on each stripe, thus reducing the chance of data loss.
RAID 6 provides the highest level of redundancy but at the cost of storage. It almost strips away half your storage capacity. This might not be an issue if you have a huge data center. However, you might want to go with RAID 10 if you cannot spare that much capacity.
Having one device with a bunch of drives configured in RAID is one thing. Connecting multiple devices like that is another. This is known as storage clustering. This storage architecture is supported on enterprise NAS storage systems like StoneFly’s super scale-out systems. Such systems are primarily used for horizontal scaling, but they also provide redundancy. Storage clustering on the best NAS systems will allow you to create an active/passive database cluster where each node has its copy of the database. A couple of nodes can go bad, but your data will still be available on other nodes.
Say goodbye to data loss and business meltdowns with forward-thinking company-wide storage infrastructure as we have covered the essentials to implement a highly redundant, low-impact, highly cost-effective strategy that moves your organization closer to the forefront of the competition.