Backups are crucial for data recovery and protection but are not a form of redundancy. Backups involve creating copies of data for restoration purposes rather than providing real-time redundancy.
vSAN utilizes a distributed architecture that replicates data across multiple hosts within a cluster. This means that each piece of data is stored on more than one node, ensuring that if one node fails, the data is still accessible from another node. This replication strategy is essential for maintaining data availability and redundancy in a virtualized environment.
While vSAN operates within a cluster of hosts to enhance performance and availability, clustering itself does not directly provide data redundancy; it is the mechanism through which vSAN can implement replication.
Snapshots are used for data protection and recovery but do not provide redundancy in the same way replication does. Snapshots capture the state of a VM at a point in time, but if the underlying data becomes inaccessible, the snapshot will not necessarily provide redundancy.