Data & System Availability - System Portability

System portability

System portability (SP) is in essence a form of server replication. It replicates the system and data drives without awareness of the applications. This can be done either at file system level, block level or using Volume Shadow Services (VSS). The first and third option can maintain consistency of the data on the replicated server, the second one can't.

This replication process uses a technique called X2V or Any To Virtual. This means it can replicate virtual as well as physical machines. This process can be a full replication or an incremental replication. Besides replicating to Direct Attached Storage (DAS) or Network Attached Storage (NAS) on the system portability host, a typical solution also incorporates a virtualization solution. That means that once the protected systems are replicated, they can easily be started on the host itself. Replication can be on a file level basis or on a block level basis. For relatively static servers, it's usually better to use file level replication while for transaction rich hosts it's usually better to choose block level.

Figure 6: OS Portability