Difference Between Virtual Machine Backup and Replication
Backup and Replication are the new techniques out in the market for the Disaster recovery and instant access to data solutions. Users get confused about the difference between What is a backup? what is replication? And what is the right solution for them to choose?
This article can help educate the users on the difference between a backup and a replication solution for their business continuity plan. The key points on which any organization is going to choose between VM Backup or replication is the recovery efficiencies, benefits and the cost.
What is VM Backup and Replication?
Backup is defined as copying of file or data blocks to some secondary site or to external media for preservation in case of any site failure or malfunction. For Disaster Recovery Backing up of the data is essential. The techniques which are used for the Backup are compression and deduplication.
Virtual Machine (VM) replication is defined as creating exact copy of the Virtual machine on a spare host in a native format. The copy VM is a synchronized copy of the original VM. Unlike backups, the size of the replicas are the same as the original VM. In VM Replication, after the first copy is made, further replications will simply add the changes that were made since the last replication.
Faster Recovery Criteria for VM?
In case of the Disaster Recovery, Recovery time objective (RTO) and Recovery point objective (RPO) are the main features to consider. RTO is the threshold time for how quickly a user can have an application information restored. RPO is defined as how recent information must be restored in case of a disaster to avoid harmful data loss.
Backup Data will only be as recent as the last time it was created, so when users rely on backups for the Disaster recovery, RPO will be higher as compared to Replication. It is because Data restoration takes some time due to data compression. Restoration of a backup will take longer time to be up and running than replication.
In most IT enterprises, downtime results in huge revenue loss. Replication provides an alternate solution to companies with low downtime and data loss.
With the Replication technique, the RPO for the applications can be reduced to almost Zero. Replication technique can also provide near to instantaneous RTO when configured with the redundant server. It is because the data is in original size and ready to be used on hardware which is identical to original. Thus, the data can be recovered within minutes.
Benefits of Backup and replication?
Granular recovery is possible with VM backup such as recovering a single VM created years ago. To avoid the concerns such as data retention, data corruption prevention, Backup is useful and can be used to create multiple copies of the data. Restoring a backup will not necessarily revert the server to the most recent version of the data. Instead, it will revert to a status dating from several hours or days ago. this completely depends on the backup schedule.
With VM Replication technique a company can have the most recent version of the up-to-date data for the shortest RTO possible and it is a good technique for critical applications that require latest up-to-date changes and synchronizations.
