I was talking to John McArthur the other day about a use case we are looking at with a customer in Canada. The customer doesn’t want to lose data if and when a disaster hits their primary data center, and their service provider’s DR data center is more than 100 miles away. Therefore, the customer is presented by the storage vendor with two options – either do Multi-Hop (one of two ways for deploying a 3 data center topology for replication over long distances, trying to lose as little data as possible – EE) or go with the new Axxana Phoenix solution. John asked me what I thought of this, and I naturally answered that Multi-Hop is too expensive, too complicated to deploy and doesn’t really solve the problem… (of long distance synchronous replication… – EE). John liked my answer… he said so… and I repeated the 3 reasons why I thought Multi-Hop doesn’t really cut it…: “It is too expensive… too complicated to deploy, and doesn’t really solve the problem…”

As I said that again, I recalled an excellent joke involving a consultant and a flock of sheep:

A shepherd was herding his flock in a remote pasture, when, suddenly, a brand-new BMW advanced out of the dust cloud towards him. The driver, a young man in a Brioni suit, Gucci shoes, Ray Ban sunglasses and YSL tie, leaned out the window and asked the shepherd… “If I tell you exactly how many sheep you have in your flock, will you give me one?” The shepherd looked at the man, obviously a yuppie, then looked at his peacefully grazing flock and calmly answered, “Sure.”

The yuppie parked his car, whipped out his IBM ThinkPad and connected it to a cell phone, then he surfed to a NASA page on the internet, where he called up a GPS satellite navigation system, scanned the area, and then opened up a database and an Excel spreadsheet with complex formulas. He sent an email on his Blackberry, and, after a few minutes, received a response. Finally, he prints out a 130-page report on his miniaturized printer, then turns to the shepherd and says, “You have exactly 1586 sheep. “That is correct; take one of the sheep,” said the shepherd. He watches the young man select one of the animals and bundle it into his car.

Then the shepherd says: “If I can tell you exactly what your business is, will you give me back my animal?” “OK, why not,” answered the young man. “Clearly, you are a consultant,” said the shepherd. “That’s correct,” says the yuppie, “But how did you guess that?” “No guessing required,” answers the shepherd. “You turned up here although nobody called you. You want to get paid for an answer I already knew, to a question I never asked, and you don’t know crap about my business…Now give me back my dog.”

So how do you know a storage sales rep is selling you on the idea of multi-hop replication?! It’s easy… no guessing required… it’s just too expensive… too complicated… and doesn’t really solve the problem… If you want Synchronous Replication over your existing Asynchronous lines… whatever the distance may be between your data centers… you need Axxana.