Move Your Data, Not Your Budget: How to Streamline and Scale Data Replication

Data now streams out of every department within an enterprise - not only the traditional data from production, sales, human resources and marketing, but automated data generated from websites, chatbots, AIs and smart Internet of Things (IoT) production facilities. This proliferation requires dedicated teams to manage them, or centres of excellence to bring them under control in businesses that have let their data roam unchecked. 

For the business, controlling proliferation and managing the streamlining and scaling of data is vital, notably as stream processing data workloads become prevalent. Data leaders must provide data replication to ensure workers have a copy of data accessible in the event of data centre downtime, disaster recovery after a flood, fire or other issues and in case of hacks, ransomware attacks or service outages.

For most users, data is just “there” on the end of the network cable or WiFi connection. They’re pleasantly unaware of the rapid pace of storage (take the new Quantum F2100, offering up to 55 GB/s read and 25 GB/s write performance and up to 737TB capacity in a single storage appliance) and the amazing network technology delivering it – not to mention the multitude of apps that provide data governance, streamlining and replication to ensure it remains available.

But the minute that data is unavailable, users will be complaining in droves and expect a fast response. Across most enterprises, that doesn’t happen thanks to replication and redundancy efforts, but as more data becomes business-critical, strong replication is a must. Typically, the database administrator is charged with delivering data replication, as data centre workloads move to the cloud.

IDC’s recent research indicates a return to normalcy for the data replication market, with a 2.7% CAGR through 2025. The public cloud services portion of the market is the bright spot, with an expected 11.6% CAGR during that time.

What is data replication?

Enterprise data replication ensures users always have access to data by creating multiple copies of it across several locations to ensure it remains accessible in all but the most unlikely of cascading failures. Locations for data storage might be in different cities or continents depending on the size of the business, and using different network providers to hedge against outages.

As ever with IT, the faster the service and the closer it is to users, the better the performance will be. Even so, as the volume of databases and the number of them in use across the business grows, efforts need to be made to streamline replication efforts, for the sake of economy and efficiency. There’s no point in replicating data that’s rarely used, and while databases might be many terabytes in size, if only the latest few days of records are required, they can be lifted and shifted into their own mini-database.

Another use for replication is to copy data into a data warehouse where it can be accessed by automated services like business intelligence, analytics, deep AI or other tools. With much to consider, data replication delivers benefits on multiple fronts, including:

• Greater uptime and efficiency among the workforce, digital or otherwise
• Improved system resilience alongside application and service redundancy efforts
• Improved access speed as latency can be reduced through smart access to multiple sources

However, as mentioned, the increasing complexity of these interweaving IT systems creates challenges.

• Complexity with data moving across many networks and sources, risking duplication errors
• Cost increases as cloud, network bandwidth and data centre services become more expensive due to rising energy/business costs
• Management time and costs will also increase, even with automation
• As data sovereignty becomes a growing issue, you may need to reconfigure your storage plans

How to streamline data replication

Having decided that replication is a business-critical effort, it should be managed in a streamlined and efficient manner to mitigate the challenges above and maximize the advantages.

With Shareplex by Quest, there are multiple ways to streamline the process, and multiplying benefits. Sharing workloads between your Oracle service or data centre and the cloud creates hybrid clouds that are more fault-tolerant and redundant. Replication delivers the high availability needed by 24/7 enterprises, with scalability to deliver that data as user or IT demand grows. The bonus of disaster recovery is ever-present if there’s a major connectivity issue across the business and faster recovery from hacks. All of this comes with real-time reporting capabilities to maintain a dashboard overview.

Final thoughts

As budget becomes more of an issue for IT to meet their growing data needs and plan for bigger data futures, streamlining data replication services will ease the financial burden while delivering several key positives for productivity and availability.

As data volumes will only ever increase, the urgency to deliver solutions is growing. Getting a handle on streamlined replication now will deliver significant savings, ensuring reliability and future efficiency for operations and future-proofing for your business strategy.