Keeping data secure on our individual systems is absolutely critical and it's probably the cornerstone
of all I.T. security there is but let's make sure we understand what we're talking about when we talk
about securing data.
Now in this case what I'm avoiding is permissions based issues I'm not talking about how do we secure
data to keep somebody from editing a file or something like that.
What I'm talking about is just within the system itself.
How do I keep all the data happy.
So what we're really talking about here is number one data integrity of some form or another making
sure that if a hard drive dies or if a power supply dies or something like that I still have that data.
We're also talking about speed.
So we want quick access.
So generically when we're talking about these types of things what we're talking about is what I'm going
to call high availability so we'll save a keeping out the hackers and keep it out the malware for other
episodes.
What we're talking about is the puer system.
What can we do to keep that data happy so let's think about high availability.
So probably the best place to start is RAID.
RAID is a great way to secure data depending on the raid level you use.
You can provide good integrity.
You can provide good speed and the nice part is is Raid 9 times out of 10 is one of the cheapest ways
you can go raid is a fantastic tool but raid is only good for the drives or the storage within a system.
So if you lose a hard drive rate is a great way to take care of these types of issues.
However what happens if I lose a power supply what happens if the entire server explodes.
Now I've got a really big problem.
So what we're talking about securing data we need to stop thinking about just the drive storage and
start thinking about the systems as a whole.
And probably the best most core way we do that is something called clustering clustering is a simple
concept.
So here I have a single computer that might have Raiden it might not.
Dono clustering simply means instead of having one computer doing the job you have two computers or
more doing the exact same job sharing the same database sharing whatever it might be.
The nice part about clustering is that if one of these systems dies the other one can automatically
kick in.
The downside to clustering is that they constantly have to keep each other updated clustering is absolutely
fantastic in fact you can see some pretty interesting setups where two servers that are acting as clustering
servers will literally have their own dedicated little network between them because they have to update
each other so much.
However number one clustering is really expensive to literally not just recreate a couple of extra drives
but to recreate an entire system can add to the price of securing data dramatically.
The downside to clustering also is that you really usually have one primary cluster machine and that
way he's always doing all the work.
You'll have other machines that act more like a backup system so we could really use these systems a
little bit more efficiently.
And when you do that you get load balancing.
Here are my two clustered servers.
Now normally with clustering one is the primary and one is kind of like the backup.
However with load balancing all you're doing is you're distributing the workload across all of these
clustered servers.
That way no one machine is totally overwhelmed.
Clustering and load balancing are absolutely powerful tools but they do tend to be a little pricey.
So one of the things we also like to do for securing data is to simply virtualize the servers.
In that case if a server were to die in one fashion or another we can simply bring it back from a snapshot.
Now just because a server is virtualise don't think that you don't still have the ability to do raid
with virtualise drives or to do clustering with virtual servers.
But really when it comes to the ultimate in securing your data virtualizing this stuff really pays off.