Can you outline some best practices around using replication in your backup strategy? Are there common mistakes you see replication users making today?
The most important advice that I give to try to help people understand is to first define the range of recovery scenarios that you need for your business:
Do you require near-immediate failover and application replication? If so,near-CDP solutions might make sense.
Do you require near-immediate rollback of data? Yes? Then snapshots may be the right solution.
Do you require geographic survivability of data? That is a disaster recovery issue — a whole separate topic.
Do you require recovery of versions of files that might be weeks or months old? In that case, traditional backup may be most appropriate.
Do you require business continuity that is going to include disaster recovery distance-based protection, as well as some availability technologies? This may require backup and DR tools along with some orchestration, monitoring and planning tools.
Once you have the defined recovery scenarios, choose the data protection tool or tools that will enable you to achieve those recovery goals. That is the key: Begin with the end in mind.
[Originally posted on TechTarget as a recurring columnist]