Geo-redundancy means placing physical servers in geographically diverse data centers to safeguard against catastrophic events and natural disasters and load balance traffic for optimal performance.
Geo-redundancy signifies a computer system operating at two or more geographical locations as a redundancy in case the primary system fails.
How does Geo-redundancy work?
Geo-redundancy duplicates IT infrastructure (servers and network resources) and stores them as a backup in two or more data centers in different regions. This makes the components simultaneously available, helps your organization’s resilience, and provides better protection.
Why is Geo-redundancy used?
Geo-redundancy protects your data and minimizes downtime by replicating your organization’s data and IT infrastructure to other sites. This helps to ensure that applications and workloads remain available during an outage or disaster.
In a production use case, it provides help in minimizing network connectivity issues and downtime and ensures traffic is transferred to alternate nodes if one fails or needs to undergo routine maintenance. In a backup use case, geo-redundancy enables the recovery of applications and workloads in case of an outage in your current location.
What are the types of Geo-redundancy?
There are three types of Geo-redundancy:
- Active-Passive Redundancy – In this model, the secondary site is passive and only becomes active if the primary goes offline. The data is replicated from the primary site to the secondary one, and the secondary site does not serve traffic until needed, which allows the backup to utilize less RAM.
- Partial Active-Active Redundancy – In this model, multiple sites are active and serve traffic simultaneously. Though the entire system is active, each component is only partially operational. Partially active solutions leave the system vulnerable to service disruptions.
- Fully Active-Active Redundancy – Each database is fully equipped and capable of running independently. In this scenario, failover does not need data flow to be updated at the database level; instead, read and write traffic is re-routed to the nearest available server.
What is the difference between redundancy and failover?
Redundancy implies the presence of redundant backup servers that are on standby and ready to take over if the primary server fails. Failover is the action of switching to a backup server or network in the case of failure.
What is the difference between redundancy and backup?
Redundancy and backups are similar but different. Backups are used for exact copies of data. They store and keep your business operational in case of data loss. While redundancy also does that but also ensures the continuity of network, applications, data, storage, power, etc., in the event of a disaster or data loss.
What is the difference between redundancy and high availability?
High availability means all systems and resources are always on and available. While redundancy does not equal high availability, it ensures that additional resources are ready in case of system failure.
