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 displa ...

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

Software

Geo-replication software is a network performance-enhancing technology that is designed to provide improved access to portal or intranet 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, intranets,

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 Lan or LAN may also refer to: Science and technology * Local asymptotic normality, a fundamental property of regular models in statistics * Longitude of the ascending node, one of the orbital elements used to specify the orbit of an object in sp ...

speeds. Geo-replication software can improve the performance of data networks that suffer limited bandwidth, latency and periodic disconnection. Terabytes 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, u ...

, 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 compressi ...

and content

caching In computing, a cache ( ) is a hardware or software component that stores data so that future requests for that data can be served faster; the data stored in a cache might be the result of an earlier computation or a copy of data stored elsewher ...

technologies. differencing 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

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References

{{reflist Business software Geography Cloud computing