Disaster Recovery

Owned by Expert
Last updated: Oct 21, 2024
2 min read

VXG Cloud VMS uses a variety of methods for automatic and fast disaster recovery. There are 2 main steps:

  1. Recovery of data.

  2. Recovery of the infrastructure.

Data recovery

The data is stored using 2 storages:

  1. Relational Database.

  2. Object Storage

The relational database is the critical component and its data should be preserved for a successful recovery. There are many standard mechanisms for that, like mirroring in different data centers.

The object storage contains large amounts of media data that is not critical for recovery. This data can be copied periodically to a backup data center, but this will increase the object storage operational costs.

AWS

Amazon RDS is used for storing indexing metadata - the most critical information required for proper operations of VXG Cloud VMS. VXG allows customers to choose between Amazon RDS Multi-AZ or Single AZ deployment. RDS Multi-AZ automatically creates a primary DB Instance and synchronously replicates the data to a standby instance in a different Availability Zone (AZ). In case of an infrastructure failure, Amazon RDS performs an automatic failover to the standby, so that you can resume database operations as soon as the failover is complete. In the case of RDS Single AZ, an automatic backup is performed every 5 minutes and allows to restore the DB to the previous state after a failover.

Amazon S3 is used for storing media data. Media data is stored in chunks usually 1 minute long. VXG allows customers to choose between S3 Standard and S3 One Zone IA object storage classes. With S3 Standard, the data will be automatically stored across multiple Availability Zones (AZ) and can be restored even in case of the Availability Zone destruction. In case of a temporary outage, only the affected objects (1 min long chunks) will be lost.

Infrastructure recovery

The fastest way to recover in case of a data center disaster is to have an idle copy of the Cloud VMS in the backup data center where the Relational Database from the primary data center has been mirrored.

If the primary data center becomes completely unavailable then the end-point domain names will be switched from the primary data center to the backup data center. The cameras will be reconnected automatically to the new data center and the Cloud VMS will scale automatically,

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AWS

The infrastructure is deployed using AWS CloudFormation – an infrastructure as code that contains a complete description of the VXG infrastructure and allows to deploy it rapidly in any Availability Zone.