Altonet meets best practice data protection requirements with mirrored, redundant data centres
Altonet, local providers of the HP Autonomy LiveVault and Connected Backup solutions, which has its vaults in the Teraco data centre in Isando, has set up mirrored vaults in a geographically separated data centre located in Midrand. This move ensures that Altonet complies with global best practice requirements for mirrored, redundant data centres to be located at least 25km apart, to ensure optimal risk mitigation in terms of disaster recovery. The additional requirements for compliance purposes are that the data centres need to be on different power grids and have full fibre redundancy. In addition, each data centre complies with HP Autonomy LiveVault requirements for secure data centres and the two setups are linked by high-speed fibre for fast data replication and up to date versioning.
“Requirements for HP Autonomy LiveVault state that in order to meet best practice, backup vaults need to be replicated in at least two different locations. Previously, our two vaults were in fairly close proximity to each other in Isando, and this did not entirely meet the criteria for compliance. As a result of this move, we are now maintaining our primary vaults in Isando and our secondary mirrored vaults in Midrand. This move will bolster our data protection and recovery compliance,” says Gareth Tudor, CEO of Altonet.
Altonet’s LiveVault data vaults mirror each other bi-directionally in real time. This ensures high availability of all of our customers data, and is in addition to Turbo Restore Appliance’s (TRA), which are kept on customer’s premises. TRA’s ensure immediate accessibility of data in case of data corruption or hardware failure, with data in the vaults being available for full disaster recovery. Furthermore, Autonomy constantly monitors the vaults, and in the unlikely event of a failure, backups are rerouted and continue automatically to the remaining vault. When the failure is repaired, all missing backup data replicates to the repaired or replaced vault. All other elements of the backend infrastructure, such as the Web servers, the backend database, and the command and control systems, are also redundant.
“Two copies of our customers’ backups are now kept at any one time in totally different locations. Data is replicated using high-speed fibre links, thus ensuring that both copies are always up to date. Not only will this move ensure we meet global standards, it also ensures that we are catering to the needs of our customers, who often need to report on our adherence to such strict requirements for their own compliance and audit purposes. Our clients can now be assured that their offsite backups meet the most stringent generic criteria as well as those of HP Autonomy, helping them to mitigate risk of data loss,” Tudor concludes.
Altonet’s mirrored data centre setup went live at the beginning of 2013 and this fully compliant data backup and protection service is now offered to all customers.