The Challenge of Meeting Stakeholder Demands

About 20 years ago, a man I have come to know very well was sitting in a room with about 20 people. He was part of a multi-disciplinary disaster recovery and business continuity management team that included representatives from IT, business units, finance, compliance, security, procurement and operations, and after a series of disasters, that included a flood near the data center and a hurricane, they were updating the DR plan.

One of the exercises that this group had to walk through was determining which applications were critical.  Of course, every representative from every business unit  determined that their business-unit applications were critical. Finance and accounting determined that their applications were critical, and even the head of application development said his applications were critical.  Why?  If his applications were down, 1000 developers were not going to be able to work, which meant as much as $500,000/day in lost productivity, not to mention delays in delivery of new applications.

The IT infrastructure for my friend’s company already included three data centers: one for production, one for development and test which was near the production data center, and one for disaster recovery, which was in another time zone.  Data for some of the production applications were replicated from the production data center to the development and test data center, so in a localized disaster, the applications could be quickly brought back on line.

Now, back to that room.  Given recent near disasters, they wanted to re-prioritize their applications. As they talked, every business unit representative and representative from application development wanted all of their application data replicated between the sites. So, the DR/BCM team put together a budget for that.  Not surprisingly, when the CFO was presented with the estimated cost, however, he said “No.”

It wasn’t the cost of the storage hardware that stopped the plan from going through, or the cost of the networking gear.  It was the cost of the bandwidth between the two data centers that killed the plan. Synchronous replication required too much bandwidth. It was simply too expensive.  So the team had to go back to the drawing board and do the very hard work of deciding which business units were more important and which applications just weren’t important enough to be completely protected.  Ultimately, the team  decided to use asynchronous replication for some applications, exposing the business units to  the very real potential for data loss.

Now, look at where we are today.  With Axxana, companies can protect all of the data and make much better use of available band-width. We recently showed a company how they could go from protecting some of the application data to protecting all of the application data.  At the same time, we showed them how we could reduce their bandwidth requirements by 38%.  I bet my friend wishes Axxana was around 20 years ago. I hope that you will contact Axxana and let us show you how we can help your company protect more data at substantially lower cost.