DISASTER RECOVERY SOLUTION
Database failures and outages are events that usually cause serious disruption to a business and can in the worst cases result in data loss or irreparable reputational damage. Therefore, a good disaster recovery plan is vital for every organisation and as experts in this area and can take care of this for you.
There are many factors that can initiate a database disaster recovery incident such as hardware failures, virus attacks, natural disasters, human errors, power failures, software failures etc. The likelihood of such events impacting your systems can be reduced through various mitigation strategies, but they can never be fully prevented. It is vital that organisations are prepared for the worst-case scenario and this demands a good disaster recovery plan.
Businesses will generally have a bespoke DR approach tailored to their specific requirements and environment. This is a complex area with many options available and the appropriate choices will be dependent on factors such as, the IT architecture, environment, scale, business requirements and resources within the organisation.
We can design, develop and implement an appropriate database disaster recovery plan for your organisation and work with you to ensure that you are covered should the worst happen. We can also review your existing arrangements and assess whether improvements can be made to optimise your existing recovery options. Ultimately our goal is to ensure that your business can continue to operate effectively in any type of disaster by deploying the most appropriate and cost-effective methods.
There are many different options that we support – the information below outlines some of the most common approaches:
Microsoft Azure Disaster Recovery:
In a Microsoft Azure environment there are several disaster recovery options for SQL Server databases using availability groups, database mirroring, or backup and restore with storage blobs. Availability replicas can also be deployed running across multiple datacenters in Azure VMs specifically for disaster recovery.
Details for Azure Disaster Recovery can be found here.
Businesses can adopt a disaster recovery solution for SQL Server databases in a hybrid-IT environment by using AlwaysOn Availability Groups, database mirroring, log shipping, and backup and restore with Azure Blob storage. All of these solutions use SQL Server running on Azure Virtual Machines. AlwaysOn Availability Groups can be used in a hybrid-IT environment where database replicas exist both on-premise and in the cloud. This is shown in the following diagram.
Database mirroring can also span on-premises servers and the cloud in a certificate-based setup. The following diagram illustrates this concept.
Log shipping can be used to synchronize an on-premises database with a SQL Server database in an Azure virtual machine.
On-premise databases can also be backed up directly to Azure Blob storage.
Azure SQL Database provides two types of recovery: Geo-Restore and Active Geo-Replication.
Geo-Restore is also available with Basic, Standard, and Premium databases. It provides the default recovery option when the database is unavailable because of an incident in the region where your database is hosted. Similar to
Point-In-Time Restore, Geo-Restore relies on database backups in geo-redundant Azure storage. It restores from the geo-replicated backup copy, and therefore is resilient to the storage outages in the primary region.
Active Geo-Replication is available for all database tiers. It’s designed for applications that have more aggressive recovery requirements than Geo-Restore can offer. Using Active Geo-Replication, you can create up to four readable secondaries on servers in different regions. You can initiate failover to any of the secondaries. In addition, Active Geo-Replication can be used to support the application upgrade or relocation scenarios, as well as load balancing for read-only workloads.
On-Premise Disaster Recovery:
There are several strategies that we can use for disaster recovery of our on-premise data center using AWS infrastructure:
1.Backup and Restore.
2.Pilot Light.
3.Warm Standby.
4.Multi-Site.
More detailed information regarding DR for AWS can be found here.
