A challenge that all companies face is how to backup data from co-located servers. The replication needs to be done to a location outside the co-location center. There are a number of reasons why this is required:
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Access to the servers at the co-location might not be possible. The Zeturf case showed how real this vulnerability is when the french government took legal action against one of the co-location centers.
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Fire, flood, earthquake, bandwidth failure or other disasters may render co-location center inoperable.
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Many Regulatory standards require that backups are kept outside the co-location center.
Replication outside the co-location center creates a number of challenges:
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Backups on media should only be done if a trusted member from your orginization is able to travel to the co-location center. Stuff at the co-location center could easily be working at a rival gaming company the following week and other conflicts of interest may exist that makes remote media an unacceptable risk.
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Bandwidth is expensive and downloading of large backup files to a remote site will takle away this precious commodity away from clients. Large backups can take hours to transfer.
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While daily backups on the server are a must, loosing 24hrs of gaming and financial data is simply not acceptable.
Our Solution provides an elagant solution that meets all these challenges:
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Backs are done in Real time, with minimum lag.
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Only changes are replicated, using only a trickle of bandwidth consumed
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Data Compression is supported.
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Data Encryption is supported.
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Backups are to a live database that can be brought online with minimum delay.
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Backup and Production databases can be running in merge mode, with both databases receiving live data. This is important in case services need to be run from backup system while services are restored.
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The server hosting the backup database is not connected directly to the internet .
