For sufficient data protection, companies must do more than just mirroring

Many folks question all sorts of things within the IT world, one them being about backup and recovery solutions. Often questions arise that are compelling and need a good answer. One of the more popular queries is why someone would need to install a backup and recovery program when mirroring is already taking place. This is an excellent question, and comes up more often than you may think. Below you will find out why mirroring alone is not enough to ensure total protection regarding your data.

Though not entirely crazy, the stance of relying upon mirroring alone for data protection seems to come from an idea that is not fully informed regarding the potential problems that could arise. In fact, the truth of the matter is that issues will often spark during the restore process, and so individuals must be well-educated and prepared regarding why mirroring is not enough to grant the protection they may be looking for.

Several studies have been done, and as a result, the reasons as to why reliance upon mirroring alone is not wise becomes quite clear. For example, many people already mirror their data to another site, but in fact, desire a 3rd copy that can be transportable. This creates flexibility in the way of restoring to various data centers. Another point here is that during the mirroring process, corrupted data is able to get through, hence the need for a 3rd copy without corruption. These facts make it plain why companies and individuals must do more than just mirroring when it comes to protecting their data. However, if these points weren't enough to convince you that mirroring alone simply doesn’t cut it, it is likely that the information in the 2 stories below will be.

During one of the most devastating natural disasters of our time, Hurricane Katrina had its way against a portion of the southern United States like never before. The fact is, so many facets of life were ruined for the people living in these particular states, and it didn't fail to wrecked havoc on some of the IT world within this region as well. For example, during this disaster, a certain business had a main site based in Louisiana and their mirrored site came out of Alabama. You can probably guess what happened. Since both states were hit by the hurricane, both sites got hit as well. In fact, they weren't just damaged by the storm, these 2 sites were LOST for good. This example proves why best practices MUST be followed with respect to mirroring, because disasters DO happen. The standard says that mirrored sites must be to the east of primary sites.

Another heart-wrenching story about loss comes out of the world of Google. Back in 2011, Google was doing some Gmail maintenance, and the technician who was doing the work made the epic mistake of deleting over 100,000 accounts. It might be hard to believe, but Google is actually quite reliant upon mirroring, and this mistake hit both primary sites and mirrored sites as well. Do you know what this means? All of these accounts were LOST. In fact, they were gone forever. Maybe this wasn't a massive loss for Google, but you can bet the folks who lost their accounts (and all of the valuable information within them) were devastated. What can we take away from these two stories of loss and devastation? Mirroring alone does NOT provide complete data protection.

Here is where mirroring is great:

Mirroring creates a platform for smoothness and continuity with respects to operations in business. The bottom line is, we cannot expect it to do more than what it is created to do. Keep in mind, mirroring will not provide a recreation of data. If one needs to go back and recreate some data, the responsibility falls into the laps of the application programmer. The humbling point here is that this programmer is by default, a human being, prone to error, and able to make mistakes.

Bear in mind that mirroring is an excellent tool, but it is also not exactly the most frugal choice. In order to create a budget-friendly way to use mirroring, people may want to consider using this tool only for particular storage groups. Clients could also make a plan as to which storage groups are a high priority and only mirror those individual applications. This way, the less critical groups could simply be backed up, thereby saving money for the company or client in the long run.

Photo credit: BsWei / Shutterstock

Mike Johnson is a Technical Writer for Rocket Software. He writes on topics like data protection, backup monitoring and reporting software. He holds a Bachelor of Science Management degree from DeVry University.