Cloud Backup provides ECS disaster recovery as a business continuity solution that continuously replicates ECS instance data to a disaster recovery site. It delivers a seconds-level Recovery Point Objective (RPO) and a minutes-level Recovery Time Objective (RTO) for critical applications.
How it works
ECS disaster recovery monitors data changes on the disks of your operating systems and ECS instances, captures changed data in real time, and synchronizes it to a disaster recovery site. If a fault disrupts the production site, you switch your business system to the disaster recovery site and resume operations within minutes.
Scenarios
ECS disaster recovery supports two deployment scenarios:
| Scenario | Protects against | RPO | RTO |
|---|---|---|---|
| Cross-region disaster recovery | Regional disasters such as tsunamis and earthquakes | 1 minute | 15 minutes |
| Cross-zone disaster recovery | Single-zone faults caused by force majeure events (fire, power outage) or equipment failures (software, hardware) | Per your business goals | Per your business goals |
Cross-region disaster recovery
Deploy the disaster recovery system across two Alibaba Cloud regions. If a natural disaster such as a tsunami or earthquake causes a fault at the production site, fail over to the disaster recovery site in the other region. Separating the production site and disaster recovery site into different regions provides high reliability.
Cross-region disaster recovery achieves an RPO of 1 minute and an RTO of 15 minutes, helping prevent system failures caused by regional disasters.
For setup instructions, see Cross-region disaster recovery.
Cross-zone disaster recovery
Protect applications against force majeure events such as a fire or power outage, and equipment failures such as a software or hardware failure within a single zone. Back up applications across zones to prevent single-zone faults and meet your business RPO and RTO goals.
For setup instructions, see Cross-zone disaster recovery.
Capabilities
| Capability | Description |
|---|---|
| Real-time data replication | Monitors data changes on the disks of operating systems and ECS instances, captures changed data, and synchronizes it to disaster recovery sites in real time. Provides second-level or minute-level RPO. |
| Quick application recovery | Runs applications in another region or zone within minutes after a failover. |
| Non-disruptive disaster recovery drills | Performs disaster recovery drills on cloud-deployed application servers at any time. Drills do not affect the source production environment or interrupt data replication. |
Benefits
| Benefit | Description |
|---|---|
| Cost-effective | Consumes only disk resources and a small number of computing resources. Requires only software authorization from operating and application systems during disaster recovery. |
| Easy to use | Start data replication, perform disaster recovery drills, and restore data in one click. No disaster recovery center deployment required. |
| Highly reliable | Guarantees continuous data replication and resumable upload even when errors occur -- for example, when the source server is overloaded or restarted, the disaster recovery gateway is restarted upon power-off, or the data replication link encounters network jitter. Alibaba Cloud guarantees the reliability of cloud data. |
| Highly secure | Encrypts data with the Advanced Encryption Standard (AES) 256-bit algorithm and HTTPS, providing end-to-end security. |
| Verifiable | Performs disaster recovery drills on cloud systems at any time without affecting the production system. |
Billing
When you use the CDR feature for ECS disaster recovery, the following fees apply:
| Fee component | Billed to | Details |
|---|---|---|
| ECS disaster recovery software | Cloud Backup bill | See Pricing of Cloud Backup. |
| Cross-region replication traffic | Cloud Backup bill | Charged for cross-region replication traffic generated by cross-region disaster recovery on the cloud. See Pricing of Cloud Backup. |
| ECS instances and disks at the disaster recovery site | ECS bill | Pay-as-you-go ECS instances and disks created at the disaster recovery site. See Pay-as-you-go. |
Other ECS disaster recovery technologies
Cloud Backup also provides ECS disaster recovery based on asynchronous replication of disks. For details, see Overview of ECS disaster recovery (async replication).