Geo-replication systems are designed to provide improved availability and disaster tolerance by using geographically distributed data centers. This is intended to improve the response time for applications such as

web portal A web portal is a specially designed website that brings information from diverse sources, like emails, online forums and search engines, together in a uniform way. Usually, each information source gets its dedicated area on the page for displayin ...

s. Geo-replication can be achieved using software, hardware or a combination of the two.

Software

Geo-replication software is a

network performance Network performance refers to measures of service quality of a network as seen by the customer. There are many different ways to measure the performance of a network, as each network is different in nature and design. Performance can also be model ...

-enhancing technology that is designed to provide improved access to portal or

intranet An intranet is a computer network for sharing information, easier communication, collaboration tools, operational systems, and other computing services within an organization, usually to the exclusion of access by outsiders. The term is used in c ...

content for uses at the most remote parts of large organizations. It is based on the principle of storing complete replicas of portal content on local servers, and then keeping the content on those servers up-to-date using heavily compressed data updates.

Portal acceleration

Geo-replication technologies are used to provide replication of the content of portals,

web application A web application (or web app) is application software that is accessed using a web browser. Web applications are delivered on the World Wide Web to users with an active network connection. History In earlier computing models like client-serve ...

s, content and data between servers, across wide area networks WAN to allow users at remote sites to access central content at LAN speeds. Geo-replication software can improve the performance of data networks that suffer limited

bandwidth Bandwidth commonly refers to: * Bandwidth (signal processing) or ''analog bandwidth'', ''frequency bandwidth'', or ''radio bandwidth'', a measure of the width of a frequency range * Bandwidth (computing), the rate of data transfer, bit rate or thr ...

, latency and periodic disconnection.

Terabyte The byte is a units of information, unit of digital information that most commonly consists of eight bits. Historically, the byte was the number of bits used to encode a single character (computing), character of text in a computer and for this ...

s of data can be replicated over a

wide area network A wide area network (WAN) is a telecommunications network that extends over a large geographic area. Wide area networks are often established with leased telecommunication circuits. Businesses, as well as schools and government entities, us ...

, giving remote sites faster access to web applications. Geo-replication software uses a combination of

data compression In information theory, data compression, source coding, or bit-rate reduction is the process of encoding information using fewer bits than the original representation. Any particular compression is either lossy or lossless. Lossless compression ...

and content caching technologies.

differencing In statistics and econometrics, and in particular in time series analysis, an autoregressive integrated moving average (ARIMA) model is a generalization of an autoregressive moving average (ARMA) model. Both of these models are fitted to time ser ...

technologies can also be employed to reduce the volume of data that has to be transmitted to keep portal content accurate across all servers. This update compression can reduce the load that portal traffic place on networks, and improve the response time of a portal.

Portal replication

Remote users of web portals and collaboration environments will frequently experience network bandwidth and latency problems which will slow down their experience of opening and closing files, and otherwise interacting with the portal. Geo-replication technology is deployed to accelerate the remote end user portal performance to be equivalent to that experienced by users locally accessing the portal in the central office.

Differencing engine technologies

To deliver this reduction in the size of the required data updates across a portal, geo-replication systems often use differencing engine technologies. These systems are able to difference the content of each portal server right down to the byte level. This knowledge of the content that is already on each server enables the system to rebuild any changes to the content on one server, across each of the other servers in the deployment from content already hosted on those other servers. This type of differencing system ensures that no content, at the byte level, is ever sent to a server twice.

Offline portal replication on laptops

Geo-replication systems are often extended to deliver local replication beyond the server and down to the laptop used by a single user. Server to laptop replication enables mobile users to have access to a local replica of their business portal on a standard laptop. This technology may be employed to provide in the field access to portal content by, for example, sales forces and combat forces.

Geo-replication systems

iOra
* Syntergy * Colligo Contributor

References

{{reflist Business software Geography Cloud computing