When signing up for SolarWinds® Papertrail™, you’ll see an option to choose where your data is stored. What does this mean? What should you consider when choosing a data center location? In this blog, we’ll explore how you can determine where to store your data.
First off, the region you choose is the physical location where your data is stored. Once you select a region, you can’t migrate data from it, so it’s important to choose carefully.
What Does It Mean to Store My Data in Each Region?
Cloud platform providers offer multiple geographic regions for hosting workloads. Each region contains numerous availability zones—the physical data centers where platform providers cluster infrastructure. Data center location matters for regions because it can impact performance and service availability. Understanding the trade-offs can help when selecting the best region to support your organization’s goals.
Should I Choose the Option Closest to My Location?
You can optimize your region selection according to your specific business objectives. If your organization is concerned about service delivery to a specific group of users, you can select a region to help you best serve your target audience. You are not required to select the region where you or your organization’s headquarters are physically located.
There are some use cases where choosing the closest region to you makes sense. For example, selecting a region near the source of the logs reduces ingestion lag. This could help improve the speed at which you see the ingested data and how fast the data arrives in your SolarWinds Papertrail account.
What Else Should I Consider When Choosing a Location?
There are a few reasons to consider choosing a data center location outside of your operating region. These include diversifying data center locations because of potential storm incidents, selecting a location close to the majority of customers, and anticipating data sovereignty needs.
Let’s explore each one and what you might want to consider when choosing the best data center location for your organization.
- Considering the importance of regional diversity
Using a separate data region for logs from your primary data storage region might help mitigate risk. With separate regions, monitoring stays up even if your primary production region has a total outage. This decoupled approach mitigates risks and might be a priority for your organization.
- Selecting a data center near the majority of customers
This consideration might be less applicable for SolarWinds Papertrail usage, but when selecting a data center, there are reasons to choose the location closest to the majority of your customers. Your company might be headquartered in Chicago, but if 50% of your users are in London, you may want to consider choosing a data center in Europe for latency reasons. Data centers outside your region put your services closer to your global users, reducing their latency and making your app feel quicker for them, though it may feel slower for you at your headquarters.
- Ensuring data sovereignty and legal compliance
Different regions have different laws about how they store data. Many industries and jurisdictions maintain strict mandates regarding data residency to ensure personally identifiable information remains under specific legal protections. An example is the European Union (EU), where organizations frequently insist on using local data centers to help keep sensitive information, including the granular data found in system logs, within the EU.
Final Thoughts
SolarWinds Papertrail offers multiple options for data center regions, and selecting the region that best aligns with your overall needs is essential. Whether you are optimizing for lower latency to keep your troubleshooting snappy, diversifying locations to build disaster resilience, or anchoring data in a specific region to meet sovereignty mandates, your choice sets the foundation for your logging strategy. Because data cannot be migrated between regions once a selection is made, it is worth taking a moment now to align your choice with your long-term business goals.
