Shadowbase Business Continuity options comprise various architectures from traditional uni-directional disaster recovery solutions to full bi-directional implementations. In uni-directional environments an active primary node is feeding a standby or passive backup system.
Bi-directional architectures allow the application to be active on all nodes in the network, processing user requests, thereby leveraging the processing capacity of each node for real application work. When building active/active systems, data collisions are an important consideration (i.e., the updating of the same data on two systems at the same time). Shadowbase replication solutions identify these data collisions, and in many cases are configured to automatically resolve them.
Support for zero downtime system, site, application, and database migrations increases the availability of the application to the user community for upgrades by totally eliminating planned outages.
Key business continuity characteristics of Shadowbase data replication solutions include:
- Dramatically improves application availability by increasing the “sparing” of major system components, such as the database. Since availability is usually expressed as a number of nine’s, as in three nines meaning an application is available 99.9% of the time, replicating the system/application with Shadowbase solutions will double the number of nines – to six nines, or 99.9999% available, in this case. In availability theory, replicating the system/application increases the number of “spares” in the system and decreases the number of “failure modes.” (For more information visit Breaking the Availability Barrier.)
- Eliminates planned application outages when using Shadowbase Zero Downtime Migrations. (For more information visit Zero Downtime Migrations.)
- Improves Recovery Point Objective (RPO). The Shadowbase process-to-process architecture allows for latencies under a second in asynchronous mode, thereby reducing the amount of data loss when the primary system is lost.
- Improves your Recovery Time Objective (RTO). The Shadowbase architecture allows system planners to configure for a number of high availability configurations. These configurations include the classic disaster recovery architecture (active primary feeding a passive standby system), the sizzling-hot-takeover architecture (active primary feeding a hot-standby system that has all applications running), and a variety of active/active architectures that allow the application to run and process user requests on all systems simultaneously.
