2 min read

Introduction

Most businesses today are critically dependent on the continued availability of their IT environments to support business operations. Business Continuity and Disaster Recovery (BCDR) allows organizations to resume operations as soon as possible when components fail, which can be due to catastrophic natural disasters (such as flooding, earthquakes, fire, hurricanes), or sometimes even caused by human component errors during operations. Delivering business continuity involves more than just high availability, not just disaster recovery – think disaster preparedness.

Technology Overview

Storage Replica is a new feature introduced in Windows Server 2016 that enables storage-agnostic, block-level, synchronous replication between servers for disaster recovery, as well as stretching of a failover cluster for high availability. Synchronous replication enables mirroring of data in physical sites with crash-consistent volumes ensuring zero data loss at the file system level. Asynchronous replication allows site extension beyond metropolitan ranges with the possibility of data loss.

Storage Replica is volume-based and uses SMB V3.1.1. It can use any fixed disk storage, as well as any storage fabric. At the time of this writing, Storage Replica does not require a cluster and can be managed using Failover Cluster Manager (FCM), PowerShell, Windows Management Instrumentation (WMI), and Azure Site Recovery (planned for 2016).

At the time of writing this article, Storage Replica support the following scenarios:

· Server-to-server storage replication using Storage Replica.

· Storage replication in a stretch cluster using Storage Replica.

· Cluster-to-cluster storage replication using Storage Replica.

· Server-to-itself storage replication using Storage Replica.

Step by Step Guide on StarWind Blog

Enjoy!

Cheers,

-Charbel