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    Resilient Data Storage – Build Your Business Immunity in 2021

    World Backup Day 2021 – March 31

    One year with the coronavirus pandemic shows that resilience is the most important factor that drives people and businesses throughout rough times. Our lives and ways we run business changed and we made a big step forward in digital transformation that otherwise could take years. Companies are no longer the buildings and office spaces, but the dispersed structures of people connected with the data and themselves. World Backup Day is a good opportunity to discuss the current backup and Business Continuity challenges and solutions in this new reality.

    Data resilience and data protection are now some of the top concerns for IT administrators, as well as business owners. In fact, data storage is the part of IT infrastructure where resilience has always the highest possible priority since the data storage administrator is always the one who tries to be prepared for the worst: disk failure, cyber-attack, earthquake, theft, or just a human error. 

    And the areas where the issues can occur are growing in number since the enterprise IT infrastructure is far more complex and decentralized now than ever before, taking into account the widespread use of virtualization, cloud, hybrid cloud, edge computing, and so on. The list of the threats is long, but you are not unarmed in this battle and can use some proven solutions to keep your data storage resilient, and the business prepared for the unexpected, such as:

    • Data self-healing 
    • Redundancy
    • Failover
    • Backup
    • On- & Off-site data protection
    • Disaster Recovery Plan

    Data Self-healing

    This very useful feature is enabled by the ZFS file system. When a data block with a mismatched checksum is detected during the read operation (it means it’s corrupted), ZFS tries to repair it using parity data. If it is possible the system amends the incorrect data on the disk with miscalculated checksum as well as provides correct data to the application requesting information. Such an operation is called data self-healing and in ZFS it is performed automatically on every read operation.

    Redundancy

    In the data storage field, redundancy is helping you to protect your data by adding additional copies of the actual data and allows correcting errors in the retained or transmitted data. The data redundancy means that, for instance, a copy of the whole file is kept. In ZFS, redundancy has many forms such as 2-way mirror, 3-way mirror, RAID-Z1, and so on.

    Failover

    In the software backup and data storage industry, failover is the automatic ability to shift the production from the malfunctioned server to another, functioning one, seamlessly and without interruptions to the currently undergoing operations. In simple terms, when a node (server) fails, its operations are resumed on another node from a point in time where they ceased to function.

    Backups

    Backups are copies of computer data that can be used to retrieve the original data after a harmful event, for instance, data corruption, disk failure, or cyberattack. Backups are the simplest forms of disaster recovery that help you to recover data. However, it’s not enough as you might have noticed from OVH’s case. That’s why it is recommended to use On & Off-site data protection as well to safeguard your most valuable information.

    On & Off-Site Data Protection

    Nowadays, a backup is necessary for all kinds of businesses. However, not everyone protects the data in an appropriate way which might result in information theft, revenue losses, or even bankruptcy. The On- & Off-site Data Protection feature in Open-E JovianDSS allows users to keep the backups in different locations, access and use the copy of the data in its place (both on- and off-site) and restore crucial company data in case of an unexpected event, that destroys data in one of the locations. 

    Disaster Recovery Plan

    “We recommend to activate your Disaster Recovery Plan” – twitted Octave Klaba, OVH Founder and Chairman, after a fire destroyed the Data Center in Strasbourg. Unfortunately for some of the OVH’s clients, it was the very first time, when they heard about such a plan. And it can cost them their business. Disaster Recovery Plan is not just the backup restoring, since it is run when the primary site is not recoverable and represents all the policies, procedures, technical solutions, and people in charge to restore data and services to a secondary survived site. And it cannot be just a plan on paper, it needs to be trained and well-known, to save time, when the disaster occurs. 

    2021 World Backup Day

    Having discussed the most essential elements that constitute a robust and resilient data protection plan, you now have the capability to protect your data even from the most dangerous of threats. And since 2020 was a challenging year, and 2021 seems to be its great successor, 2021 World Backup Day is a gentle reminder to always be prepared for the unexpected.

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