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While snapshots provide an ideal solution for infrequent or smaller-scale data loss occurrences, when it comes to catastrophic failures or natural disasters, a second, geographically separate copy of a dataset is clearly beneficial. Here, a solution is required that is significantly faster and less error-prone than a recovery from tape, yet still protects the data from localized failure.
OneFS SyncIQ software delivers high-performance, asynchronous replication of unstructured data to address a broad range of recovery point objectives (RPO) and recovery time objectives (RTO). This enables customers to make an optimal tradeoff between infrastructure cost and potential for data loss if a disaster occurs. SyncIQ does not impose a hard limit on the size of a replicated file system so will scale linearly with an organization’s data growth up into the multiple petabyte ranges.
SyncIQ is easily optimized for either LAN or WAN connectivity and includes policy level bandwidth control and reservation. This allows replication over both short and long distances, while meeting consistent SLAs and providing protection from both site-specific and regional disasters. Also, SyncIQ uses a highly parallel, policy-based replication architecture designed to leverage the performance and efficiency of clustered storage. As such, aggregate throughput scales with capacity and allows a consistent RPO over expanding datasets.
SyncIQ supports up to one thousand defined policies, of which up to fifty may run concurrently. SyncIQ policies also have a priority setting to allow favored policies to preempt others. In addition to chronological scheduling, replication policies can also be configured to start whenever the source is modified (change based replication). If preferred, a delay period can be added to defer the start of a change-based policy.
In EDA environments, SyncIQ can be leveraged to protect data in several different ways starting from replicating EDA Tools and binaries to design project data across different geographical locations for collaborative design challenges. Many customers use SyncIQ to replace physical tape-based backup environments by protecting data to another PowerScale cluster.