A Belt and Suspenders Approach to Data Protection

You won’t win any fashion awards for wearing a belt and suspenders, but the combination can save you from being caught with your pants down. Data loss, or the inability to access your data, will cause more than red cheek blushing from a fashion faux pas. It can destroy an organization and the team responsible for it. In IT, belt and suspenders is a term used to describe the maximum level of data protection and safety. More specifically, it means having redundant safety methods in place to eliminate risk: both a belt AND suspenders for holding up your pants.

Wasabi’s suspenders, 99.999999999% of durability and 99.99% availability (let’s call them left and right suspenders) are two very different aspects of data protection. Durability refers to long-term data preservation. Availability, on the other hand, refers to data accessibility.

Our left suspender, durability, is expressed as an annual percentage rate, approaching 100%. It is a metric used to measure protection of users’ data from disk failures, bit rot, degradation, or other corruption. The closer to 100%, the greater the durability of the storage platform. Wasabi uses advanced, industry-proven processes to protect data against drive failures and associated media errors. This allows Wasabi to provide 11 x 9s of data durability, fully protecting customer data.

Availability, our right suspender, refers to system uptime, i.e., the storage system is operational and can deliver data upon request. If a data center guarantees 99.9% uptime, that means it could be offline .1% of the time or about 9 hours a year. Each Wasabi storage region is engineered using redundant compute, storage, and networking equipment; redundant power sources; and redundant internet connections. Wasabi’s resilient system architecture has no single point of failure to ensure extremely high availability. We back our service by a stringent Service Level Agreement.

However, things can and do go wrong. Floods, fires, and earthquakes can cause power outages or interruptions in the Internet service and can take entire data centers or storage regions offline for several hours per year. Unforeseen acts of nature are rare, but do happen.

Object replication adds an additional layer of protection and availability

The belt in our belt and suspenders analogy is Wasabi Object Replication. Replicating data to a second storage region delivers two things:

1. Insures against local disasters (hurricanes, tornadoes, wildfire, earthquake) that could physically destroy a storage region, or take it offline
2. Increase availability

Object replication is a feature of Wasabi Hot Cloud Storage that allows customers to copy objects from a storage bucket in a specific Wasabi region to a different bucket in another Wasabi region on the same continent. Putting geographical distance between the copies of your data is ideal for adding an extra layer of data protection. You can provide automatic failover if the primary storage region is offline. With two storage regions and automatic replication between them, downtime can be reduced to seconds per year on average.

Wasabi's single administrative interface provides users with customizable dashboards. Its intuitive user interface makes it easy to configure storage parameters, set up workflows, and move data between storage buckets to optimize protection and performance. It is designed using serverless compute, automation services, and auto-scaling mechanisms that allow for replicating files, objects, and buckets at the highest speeds possible. Once you have your data replication policies configured, all newly added objects in the source bucket will be synchronously copied to the designated destination bucket in the storage region of your choice within the continent. Wasabi Object replication is available in all Wasabi storage regions.

Object replication between Wasabi regions is a no-cost service for Wasabi customers. Replication of buckets between Wasabi regions only incurs the cost of the additional storage. There are no network transfer costs for moving the copied data between regions. There are no “operations” charges for data “COPY” and “PUT” requests for the destination storage bucket. Network transfer and API request charges can add thousands of dollars a year to the cost of data replication in AWS, Azure, and GCP.

If you are interested in learning more about Wasabi Object Replication, contact your Wasabi partner representative or Wasabi sales representative at [email protected].