Implementing Affordable In-House Disaster Recovery

Having two data centers, especially when they are separated by a significant distance, brings so many advantages, it’s difficult to name them all, but here are just a few:

• The ability to increase the frequency and quality of disaster recovery testing
• The ability to perform site maintenance and upgrades, while maintaining application availability
• The ability to rapidly restore applications and continue operations in the event of a regional disaster

The reason organizations use 3rd-party disaster recovery service providers is, in part, because they don’t want to absorb the full cost of having a second location sitting idle, just in case a disaster happens. It is cost prohibitive for most organizations. But forward-thinking companies have recognized that application development and test environments can be re-purposed for production applications, when a disaster occurs. In this way, no infrastructure is wasted, and no systems are sitting idle. A two-data center architecture, with development, test, and disaster recovery in one location, and production in the other, provides the ideal approach for both resource efficiency and resiliency.

The biggest challenge for organizations may be to determine the best way to get all of the current application data from the primary production location to the development, test, and disaster recovery location. Asynchronous replication is clearly the approach of choice, in terms of cost and flexibility for locating the secondary site, but it ensures that some data will be lost. Many of you saw our recent announcement about Animal Health International becoming an Axxana customer. The approach that Animal Health took, combining asynchronous replication with disaster-proof protection of the synchronous lag, is precisely the approach that organizations should take. The combination gives organizations a complete solution that is both affordable and flexible.