In today’s always-on world, any downtime to your business-critical systems can create a significant impact to your business and your revenue. This server downtime can come from any number of causes such as server failure, natural disasters, ransomware or even just human error.
Which is why in addition to having a separate set of backups, it’s important that you have a replicated copy of your business-critical systems that you can failover to and keep your business running with minimal downtime should disaster strike.
CloneManager’s Enhanced Testing for Replication feature can help you proactively resolve any issues with your replicated system while maintaining your RPOs during system testing.
Read here how to strengthen your replications with Enhanced Testing.
About Enhanced Testing
The worst time to find out that there’s a problem with your replicated system? When you’re relying on it to keep your business running in a real Disaster Recovery (DR) Scenario.
Which is why it’s so important to regularly test your replicated system; so that when you do need to failover in a real DR scenario, you can be confident that it will keep your business running without any further issues.
However, the act of testing your replication can pose its own challenges. By testing the replicated system, you’ll likely interrupt the dataflow from your source system, meaning your target system is not continually kept up to date and damaging your RPOs.
How Enhanced Testing Works
Enhanced testing lets you verify the integrity of the target system so that if your production system fails, you have total confidence that your replicated copy will keep your business running.
With Enhanced Testing, you can boot the replicated copy of your production systems to check and run tests on the OS, the applications, the configurations and the data.
So, if there are any issues on the target system, you can proactively fix these issues in advance and make sure your business is prepared for a real production system failure.
CloneManager helps you hit your RPOs
Whilst running tests on your target system with Enhanced Testing, CloneManager will continue to sync across the changes from your production system to your target and keep it continually updated so that there’s minimal data loss to your business should disaster strike.
This is because CloneManager creates a thin layer of virtualisation within the Enhanced Testing ISO and within this environment, boots an isolated copy of the replicated system for testing purposes.
As this copy is now isolated away from the production syncs, it doesn’t interrupt the transfer of data and allows these syncs to continue on the regular user-defined schedule. This keeps your system up to date throughout the testing process, and ensures you’re hitting your RPOs.
Enhanced Testing to all combinations of Physical, Virtual and Cloud Environments
With Enhanced Testing, we still offer the flexibility of source and target systems that you expect from Cristie Software.
Whilst other replication software might have testing available for virtual or cloud environments, or maybe even a physical source with a virtual target, Cristie offers Enhanced Testing to all combinations of physical, virtual and cloud environments, including physical to physical replications.
And that ability to test the replicated, DR copy on a P2P replication, without affecting the live data transfers, is, as far as we’re aware, only available with Cristie CloneManager.
Your Disaster Recovery Plan
We hope we’ve given you some insight on why testing your replicated copy is crucial to an effective disaster recovery plan and how Cristie can help you maintain your RPOs and keep your system updated whilst running those tests in any environment.
Read here how CloneManager and Enhanced Testing helped keep a US Healthcare Company’s systems operational.
To learn more about our products, including CloneManager, click here and to book a free trial of CloneManager, click here.
