Difference between Failover and Failback NAS storage devices?

Difference between Failover and Failback NAS storage devices?

Disasters rarely strike when you expect. However, in an enterprise NAS storage disaster recovery (DR) situation, you must restore your infrastructure quickly and efficiently. Failover and failback help sustain normal operations even when your primary production site is disabled.

This article will see the differences in both approaches and which one is better suited to large enterprises.

What is NAS storage failover?

Storage failover is a technology that can work with your storage to keep your business up and running.

If you are using enterprise NAS storage for your virtual machines, you should be using storage failover. Why? You have to have backups of your backups!

With NAS storage failover, the files are copied over to a completely separate appliance.

This way, you’ll not lose any data if one device fails. In addition, it is cheaper than RAID, and it doesn’t require extra staff on-site!

What is failback NAS storage?

For larger organizations, Network Attached Storage failback is a critical component of a disaster recovery plan. Typically, NAS storage data protection solutions allow customers to replicate their data from a primary site to a secondary site for disaster recovery purposes. Redundancies built into the network attached storage solution permit the primary site server to fail without adversely impacting customer operations. In addition, customers can configure their secondary site servers with mirror images of the primary site servers.

How are both different?

Think of failover and failback as complimentary yet essential elements of a robust DR framework. The failover operation switches production from a primary site to a backup site. On the other hand, a failback returns data to the primary location after a disaster is resolved.

Failover can mitigate the impact of an interruption by maintaining operations even in the case of a potential system malfunction. For example, if you experience a significant outage, you can quickly repair any of your best NAS systems through “failing over” to a copy of the system.

In this sense, failover is the process of moving essential workloads that are critical to business away from the primary production system and into an appropriate recovery site, thus restoring production system operations.

Based on the event that caused the failure, the system can be reverted to the latest version or a particular recovery image. By regularly copying system images, you ensure that you have different versions of your system.

Failback allows you to restore the image before the disaster and then restore workstations copied from the copy system to the production system.

However, note that it is probable that slight modifications will occur in the recovery system after failover. Therefore, it is essential to sync the new or restored production system to the copy before failing back to ensure that you do not lose vital business information.

Bottom Line We hope this sheds some light on the two different approaches with similar ends. If you are interested in failover super scale-out NAS storage appliances laced with other nifty security features like deduplication and AES 256 bit encryption, we recommend you check out Stonefly. Learn more How about to secure and scale-out your NAS storage.