Business Continuity Solutions
As organizations around the globe search for ways to improve the
availability of critical enterprise data, they are increasingly
turning to extended data center fabrics. Data centers need to
support a wide range of corporate Business Continuity options in a
cost-efficient manner. Like an insurance policy, no one likes to
pay the premiums but everyone fears the repercussions of not being
covered.
The Cost of Data Center Failure
A networked data center strategy addresses one of the most
critical factors in any disaster-ready storage environment: the
ability to recover data and quickly bring systems back online
following a disaster. Disaster Recovery (DR) sites are located at
increasing distances from the central data center to be closer to
energy sources to cut costs while at the same time to be far enough
away from the center site to ensure protection in the event of a
catastrophic natural disaster. Internet applications and global
business practices have established the 24-hour business day,
severely restricting the amount of downtime available to perform
regular data backup procedures. And even minutes of downtime can
pose significant consequences to many types of organizations.
For today's enterprise data centers, business continuity /
disaster recovery is a mandatory requirement, if not for regulatory
compliance then for company survival. Whether downtime costs
thousands or millions of dollars per hour, a prolonged data outage
leaves a company vulnerable to competition, depreciation of brand,
and loss of customers. One of the persistent challenges for IT
administrations then is to create a workable BC/DR plan that is
always under constant pressure from budgetary constraints and the
steady growth of data requiring protection.
The business continuity solution needs to:
- Eliminate single points of failure to increase system
resiliency and maximize data availability
- Incorporate failover software to prevent or better tolerate
system outages
- Streamline data backup and recovery processes to reduce the
time to recovery
- Enable high-performance remote backup, electronic vaulting, and
mirroring at data centers separated by great distances
- Comply with corporate regulatory compliance requirements
- Provide encryption for data in flight and at rest
The Extended Data Center
Over the past decade storage networking technology has
developed a new set of products and protocols that facilitate
practical implementation of today's BC/DR requirements. We are no
longer bounded by distance or bandwidth restrictions and it is now
possible to deploy business continuity solutions that span
thousands of miles. Brocade SAN Routers, for example, are
supporting DR installations that link sites in Japan to recovery
centers on the US east coast and others that span the Atlantic from
Europe to the US. These extremely long-distance data protection
solutions were unthinkable 10 years ago.
Native Fibre Channel technology provides extended distance
connectivity of up to 120 km. This distance enables enterprise
customers to maintain geographically separate disaster recovery
facilities or mirroring operations. When used as part of an
extended data center fabric, SANs can utilize WANs or Metropolitan
Area Networks (MANs) to cover even longer distances.
Continuous Data Protection
Continuous Data Protection (CDP) is a methodology that
continuously captures or tracks data modifications and stores
changes independent of the primary data, enabling recovery points
from any point in the past. CDP solutions can be block based, file
based or application based. Compared to tape backup or data
replication, CDP offers much finer granularity and the ability to
move the recovery point objective selectively backward in time.
