GCP – Instance Replication now available for Filestore

We are excited to announce Filestore Instance Replication on Google Cloud, which helps customers meet their business continuity goals and regulatory requirements. The feature offers an efficient replication point objective (RPO) that can reach 30 minutes for data change rates of 100 MB/sec.

Our customers have been telling us they need to meet regulatory and business requirements for business continuity, and have been looking for file storage that provides that capability.  Instance Replication lets customers replicate Filestore instances to a secondary location – a remote region, or a separate zone within a region.  The feature continuously replicates increments and changes in data taking place on the active instance to the standby instance in the secondary location.  

The process of replicating an instance is simple:  

• A new designated standby instance is created in the remote location

• The feature performs an initial sync moving all data from the active source instance to the standby replica instance

• Upon completion, incremental data is continuously replicated 

• An RPO metric lets customers monitor the replication process

• In the event of an outage in the source region, customers can break the replication 

• Customers can simply connect their application to the replica instance and continue their business – with minimal data loss.

It can take as little as 2 minutes to set up, monitoring is simple, and breaking the replication is achieved using a single command. 

The feature is available on Filestore Regional, Zonal, Enterprise and High Scale tiers. Instance Replication functionality is provided at no charge and customers are billed for the components used in the service, which are the Filestore instances and cross-regional networking. Give it a try here.