5Replicating recovery pointsReplicationReplication is the process of copying recovery points and transmitting them to a secondary location forthe purpose of disaster recovery. The process requires a paired source-target relationship between twocores. Replication is managed on a per-protected-machine basis; meaning, backup snapshots of aprotected machine are replicated to the target replica core. When replication is set up, the source coreasynchronously and continuously transmits the incremental snapshot data to the target core. You canconfigure this outbound replication to your company’s own data center or remote disaster recovery site(that is, a “self-managed” target core) or to a managed service provider (MSP) providing off-site backupand disaster recovery services. When you replicate to an MSP, you can use built-in workflows that let yourequest connections and receive automatic feedback notifications.Figure 5. Basic Replication ArchitectureReplication begins with seeding.The initial transfer of deduplicated base images and incrementalsnapshots of the protected agents, which can add up to hundreds or thousands of gigabytes of data.Initial replication can be seeded to the target core by using external media. This is typically useful forlarge sets of data or sites with slow links. The data in the seeding archive is compressed, encrypted anddeduplicated. If the total size of the archive is larger than the space available on the removable media, thearchive can span across multiple devices based on the available space on the media. During the seedingprocess, the incremental recovery points replicate to the target site. After the target core consumes theseeding archive, the newly replicated incremental recovery points automatically synchronize.81
