3 Application Architectures for Successful Disaster Recovery in the Cloud

Over the past few years, we’ve written several blog posts about various disaster recovery methods for your applications running atop of Cloud-A’s infrastructure. If you take a look at these various articles, which highlight software and tools to help you achieve your disaster recovery requirements, you’ll notice that there there is more than one way to skin this cat.

The method you use to backup and recover your applications and data should vary depending on the technical requirements of a given application and/or data store and your organization’s tolerance for downtime for that app or data store.

Let’s dig into three conceptual models for disaster recovery on Cloud-A. We’ve ranked these methods 1-5 by data resiliency, time to recover and cost.

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Server Snapshots on Cloud-A are now 74% FASTER!

Last week we launched a revolutionary new product at Cloud-A that we designed to dramatically increase the speed and efficiency of instance snapshots on Openstack cloud platforms. We built this product based on feedback we have received over the past year from our users and partners who demanded more efficient snapshotting.

There are a couple of inherent challenges with the default OpenStack’s snapshot capability out of the box including:

1. Snapshotting a VM requires the VM to be paused temporarily. Depending on how large a VM is, the pause could be anywhere from a few seconds to several minutes – which is unacceptable for a mission critical server.

2. OpenStack’s standard configuration is that the compute node hosting the VM being snapshotted also performs the snapshot operation. This can create what is called the “noisy neighbour effect,” where the process of snapshotting a VM can have a negative performance impact on another tenant’s VM.

With this new technology we’ve developed, the compute resources are isolated and allocated to tenant VMs from the compute resources that serve VM snapshots, increasing the speed of snapshots and decreasing the pause time of a VM by an average of 74%, as well as preventing the noisy neighbour effect.

This new product is now live on Cloud-A and available at no additional cost.