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Community Blog 3 Ways to Protect against Data Loss through Disaster Recovery

3 Ways to Protect against Data Loss through Disaster Recovery

Discover how you can protect your enterprise from data loss by implementing a data backup and disaster recovery solution with Alibaba Cloud's Data Transmission Service.

Presently, cloud technology has become the ideal technical choice for enterprises due to its high flexibility, scalability, and cost effectiveness. However, even the most reliable cloud vendor might have a bad day. Last month, AWS and another cloud vendor both encountered IDC failures. A fatal fire broke out in AWS's Tokyo-based IDC. An I/O exception occurred on some cloud disks of a Beijing-based cloud vendor. As a result, some users' online data was completely lost and could not be restored.

In this era, where data is everything to an enterprise, the loss of all the platform data of an Internet startup company could push the company to the brink of bankruptcy. Failures caused by cloud vendors can directly impact a company's, wiping out years of work in one day. Moreover, the resulting economic losses and negative effect on brands are immeasurable.

Disaster recovery against data loss is critical to enterprises. The importance of data backup and disaster recovery (DR) cannot be overemphasized. So, which measures should we take to protect data against the risk of data loss?

To ensure business continuity, you should create a DR IDC by using cross-region, cross-cloud, or hybrid cloud DR solutions. When the cloud service of the active business center fails, the business can be quickly switched to the DR IDC for recovery in seconds. Alibaba Cloud Data Transmission Service supports real-time data synchronization across various common relational databases, NoSQL, and large databases. Using Data Transmission Service, you can quickly build a DR IDC to achieve robust business continuity.

From 2013, Data Transmission Service has taken over Alibaba Group's real-time data flow links, implementing stable, real-time data synchronization at the remote multi-active underlying layer during Double Eleven for five consecutive years. At present, Data Transmission Service has served tens of thousands of customers. Many well-known enterprises, including ChemChina, Tianhong Fund, 58 Daojia, Yintai Group, Wasu, Neusoft Cloud Technology, and DJI, use Data Transmission Service to build data DR IDCs to enhance their service continuity.

Disaster Recovery Solution Using Data Transmission Service

Data Transmission Service is always used to store the core data of the business line due to the ACID capability of databases. To prevent core business data loss due to a cloud service failure and the resulting service unavailability, data in the database must be backed up in real time. That is, to minimize data loss, in addition to the existing data, business update data also needs to be backed up in real time.

Data Transmission Service provides a variety of remote DR solutions for you to choose from, including the Alibaba Cloud cross-region DR, cross-cloud vendor DR, and local DR solutions.

Solution 1: Alibaba Cloud Cross-Region DR

If your business is already deployed in region A of Alibaba Cloud, you can use Data Transmission Service to build a DR IDC in region B. If the business in region A fails, it is switched to region B, preventing business unavailability due to a failure in region A. The following figure shows the specific business architecture.

1

As shown in the figure above, when Region A normally provides the service, the business writing traffic and primary reading traffic are undertaken by business and data storage in Region A. The disaster recovery data in Region B can provide querying, reporting, testing or backup capabilities, further reducing the cost of disaster recovery while ensuring the high availability of businesses.

When a fault occurs in region A, the traffic is directly switched to region B allowing the business to be restored in seconds. This prevents the economic losses and the negative impact on the company's brand that could be caused by the fault.

Solution 2: Cross-Cloud Vendor Backup

If your business is supported by another cloud vendor, you can still use Alibaba Cloud as a backup data center. By building a DR IDC on Alibaba Cloud with Data Transmission Service enabled, you can eliminate business unavailability due to a fault of the cloud vendor.

2

As shown in the preceding figure, when the cloud vendor is operating normally, the write traffic and the majority of read traffic to the business are carried by the storage resources of the vendor. The DR data on Alibaba Cloud can be used for querying, reporting, testing, or backup purposes, further reducing DR costs while ensuring a high business availability.

When the cloud vendor encounters a fault, the traffic is directly switched to Alibaba Cloud and the business can be restored in seconds. This prevents the economic losses and the negative impact on the company's brand that could be caused by the fault.

Solution 3: Cloud DR IDC

If your business is not migrated to the cloud yet, you can use Alibaba Cloud as another data center of yours. The establishment of cloud disaster recovery centers on Alibaba Cloud through DTS can avoid business unavailability caused by a fault in the local IDC center. Compared with the self-built IDC disaster recovery center in other regions, this disaster recovery solution boasts evident advantages such as a low cost and high scalability.

3

As shown in the figure above, when the local self-built IDC normally provides the service, the business writing traffic and primary reading traffic are undertaken by business and data storage in the local self-built IDC. The DR data on Alibaba Cloud can be used for querying, reporting, testing, or backup purposes, further reducing DR costs while ensuring a high business availability.

When self-built IDC suffers a regional fault, the business will switch the traffic directly to Alibaba Cloud and the business can be restored within seconds, perfectly avoiding the economic losses caused by the fault and the impact on the company's brand.

Conclusion

Data Disaster Recovery that is empowered by Alibaba Cloud's Data Transmission Service is the foundation of the DR IDC. For specific applications, the corresponding upper-layer application DR solutions must be configured based on their own software architectures.

In addition to providing the remote DR capability, Data Transmission Service also enables implementation of zero-downtime business migration, OLTP-to-OLAP real-time data synchronization, real-time data change capturing, and other functions.

For more information about Data Transmission Service, visit https://www.alibabacloud.com/product/data-transmission-service

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Comments

Raja_KT February 8, 2019 at 8:07 am

Yes Cross-Region DR thru DTS, multi-cloud and Cloud DR IDC are robust way for BC/DR