Insider: Trio Takes DR to Next Level

A technology trio could revolutionize disaster recovery for enterprise storage managers.

According to the latest Byte and Switch Insider, the standard methods of disaster recovery -- replication, mirroring, and archiving -- aren't cutting it anymore. It is simply too costly, time consuming, and complicated to apply these techniques to huge volumes of application data, especially across multiple remote sites.

But according to the report, "Disaster Recovery's New Triple Play," continuous data protection (CDP), wide-area file services (WAFS), and wide-area network (WAN) optimization, implemented together, can boost disaster recovery into the realm of huge data volumes and multisite networks.

Specifically, CDP brings recovery point objectives for DR to nearly zero by maintaining a running log of storage changes as they are written. This ensures that when an outage occurs, individual files, applications, volumes, or file systems can be restored from any point in time quickly, without the need for searching and assembling copies -- and often without IT intervention. WAFS and WAN optimization can speed up restoral and maintain WAN reliability during mission-critical storage processes.

Besides improving the recovery point objective and the recovery time objective while making sure WAN capacity can replicate large amounts of data between sites, the key advantage of using CDP, WAFS, and WAN optimization comes from the potential costs savings derived from taking storage resources out of multiple remote offices and consolidating them in data centers.Of course, there are difficulties, which the report explores in depth. CDP, for instance, comes with a variety of tradeoffs that include price, performance, and ease of use. WAN optimization and WAFS gear come in a range of forms, which differ in their ability to compress and streamline data to remote sites.

The report explores the available options, using comparative charts and a series of case studies. Products from the following vendors are profiled:

Mary Jander, Site Editor, Byte and Switch

Email Archiving: Who Does What is available as part of an annual subscription (12 monthly issues) to Byte and Switch Insider, priced at $1,350. Individual reports are available for $900.

To subscribe, or for more information, please visit: www.byteandswitch.com/insider.To request a free executive summary of the report, or for details on multi-user licensing options, please contact:

Lee Salem
Sales Director
Heavy Reading Enterprise
415-947-6144
[email protected]