Live Synchronization of Virtual Machines for Disaster Recovery
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Solution Overview
Problem
Existing data recovery methods face significant challenges in minimizing downtime during failover situations, particularly when large amounts of data need to be restored after a catastrophic failure, as they often require lengthy restore operations.
Innovation Solution
The Live Synchronization (Live Sync) feature creates a 'warm' virtualized computing platform with ready virtual machines that can take over data processing from a production environment, using incremental forever replication, deduplication, and synthetic full backups to minimize the impact on production systems and reduce recovery time.
Engineering Contradictions & Design Principles
Engineering Contradiction Analysis
1Reliability
If traditional restore operations are used to recover data after catastrophic failure, then data can be restored to failover systems, but the restore operations take a very long time when large amounts of data need to be restored
Solution Approach 1:
The system creates warm standby virtual machines in advance at disaster recovery sites and continuously synchronizes data to them before failures occur. This preliminary preparation eliminates the need for time-consuming restore operations after catastrophic failure, reducing downtime from hours/days to minutes while ensuring data recovery capability
2Loss of time
If continuous replication is performed to maintain failover systems, then recovery time is reduced, but the impact on production systems increases
Solution Approach 1:
The system uses backup data to create copies of virtual machines at disaster recovery sites rather than replicating live data from production systems. This copying approach minimizes impact on production systems while maintaining up-to-date failover capabilities through incremental forever replication and synthetic full backups
3Reliability
If multiple virtual machines are replicated simultaneously, then comprehensive disaster recovery is achieved, but the time required to replicate large numbers of virtual machines increases
Solution Approach 1:
The system segments the replication process into multiple concurrent streams, allowing simultaneous replication of multiple virtual machines through parallel operations. This segmentation enables comprehensive disaster recovery coverage for large numbers of VMs while reducing total replication time through efficient resource utilization
Data Source
AI summary
An illustrative “Live Synchronization” feature in a data storage management system can reduce the downtime that arises in failover situations. The illustrative Live Sync embodiment uses backup data to create and maintain a ready (or “warm”) virtualized computing platform comprising one or more virtual machines (“VMs”) that are configured and ready to be activated and take over data processing from another data processing platform operating in the production environment. The “warm” computing platform awaits activation as a failover solution for the production system(s) and can be co-located at the production data center, or configured at a remote or disaster recovery site, which in some embodiments is configured “in the cloud.” Both local and remote illustrative embodiments are discussed herein. An “incremental forever” approach can be combined with deduplication and synthetic full backups to speed up data transfer and update the disaster recovery sites.