The question of the difference between high availability and data protection often comes up. Many people often think they are the same thing because high availability and data protection are all about recoverability, right?
Data protection is the safeguarding of the data of an entity such as an organization or an individual. Data protection is the comprehensive approach of safeguarding data. There are different forms of data protection. Data protection includes high availability, disaster recovery, backup, and archive. Therefore, high availability is only one facet of data protection.
High availability is the specific form of data protection for ensuring your application and data are always available without interruption, with the ability to recover immediately in the event of a problem or disaster. High availability is usually only applied to the most critical applications and data of an organization because it involves having a duplicate system available to automatically failover to in the event of a disaster or problem. The costs are often high for having a dedicated duplicate system so that is why high availability is often preserved for only the most mission critical applications of an organization. The switchover to the duplicated system may be manual but is often automatic, to ensure zero downtime in the event of a failure of the mission critical application. Therefore, high availability is an extremely specific form of data protection.
Data protection is the overarching umbrella that incorporates high availability, disaster recovery, backup and archive. Disaster recovery is different than high availability where safeguarding is planned for all applications and data in the event of an unexpected error to a complete site disaster. Disaster recovery can also be inclusive of high availability planning. Backup involves ensuring there are copies of data to recover to and providing recovery points. And archive is for ensuring there are dated and time stamped backups of data for recovery of data from the past.
So, in hopes of distinguishing the difference, let’s review…
Recoverability is the key for data protection. High availability is specific within data protection of ensuring that recoverability for mission critical applications and data without interruption occurs in the event of a disaster and utilizing duplicated and synchronized environments to automatically provide that assurance. All organizations need data protection, with backup as a bare minimum and disaster recovery as a critical component. Archiving is also deemed as being highly valuable. High availability is an option for those workloads and data that organizations have determined must not experience downtime and are willing to invest in the infrastructure required to support it.
