Hot Standby

High availability and protection against data loss - even in the event of system failures

Highest security for and availability of your organization's data and information are one of the cornerstones of EMA®. Our unique Hot Standby feature provides an additional level of protection.

To provide access to information, all modern archives require hardware platforms and databases. The software components can quickly become a limiting factor. Data centers often need to guarantee service response times, and therefore need to consider appropriate mitigation strategies when planning out the overall system infrastructure.

To comply with service level agreements (SLA), the standard practice is to use complex cluster installations and shadow databases. However, even these solutions cannot always prevent technical outages. One fact that is often forgotten is that today's modern hardware platforms are comparatively stable, and only malfunction very rarely, if at all. Logical errors or database malfunctions are a comparatively higher source of failure that can often quickly lead to a partial or complete outage of the archive. Restoring databases is very time-consuming and can often only be done using extensive manual technical intervention. More often than not, it is not simply sufficient to restore the last backup. Unfinished transactions and redo logs are two important factors to consider, for example.

EMA's newly developed and unmatched Hot Standby feature can guarantee returning to a productive state just seconds after a partial or total outage has occurred. The decisive advantage over conventional cluster-based solutions is that two or more appliances can work completely isolated from each other. At no point will one appliance have to access the database of another appliance.

When the Hot Standby feature is enabled, all EMA appliances work together in what we collectively refer to a "Hot Standby Federation." Every appliance is connected in a way that ensures that its standby appliance(s) build their own databases and work completely independent from the primary system. This setup guarantees that complete access to all functionality can be restored in a matter of minutes.

Should the worst case ever occur, this setup guarantees that complete access to all functionality can be restored in a matter of seconds using a few clicks. The standby EMA appliance can optionally apply the entire configuration and individual settings without additional administrative intervention. If an error occurs, all new data created during the switchover is automatically transferred from the EMA storage cache area to the newly active system. This guarantees a complete and gapless access to all archived information almost twenty-four hours a day, without any data loss, and without any additional costs.

Our Hot Standby concept allows multiple standby appliances to be deployed locally and globally in different physical locations. This allows you to design and implement an affordable, yet powerful disaster recovery system that can grow with your organization.

Effective high availability made easy!