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A solid business continuity plan is at the core of every effective data protection strategy. An explicitly defined and routinely tested plan is essential to minimize the potential impact to the workflow when a failure or natural disaster occurs
Among the primary approaches to data protection are fault tolerance, redundancy, snapshots, replication (local and/or geographically separate), and backups to nearline storage, VTL, or tape.
Some of these methods are biased towards cost efficiency but have a higher risk associated with them, and others represent a higher cost but also offer an increased level of protection. Two ways to measure cost against risk from a data protection point of view are:
The availability and protection of data can be illustrated in terms of a continuum:
At the beginning of the continuum sits high availability. This requirement is usually satisfied by redundancy and fault tolerant designs. The goal here is continuous availability and the avoidance of downtime by the use of redundant components and services. Further along the continuum are the data recovery approaches in order of decreasing timeliness: SnapshotIQ for fast recovery, followed by SyncIQ, and finally traditional backup, providing insurance against large-scale data loss, natural disasters, and other catastrophic events.
For more information, see the High Availability and Data Protection with Dell PowerScale Scale-out NAS white paper.