Posts Tagged ‘Synchronous replication’

Twins!

Everyone loves twins. They just make you smile. And if you have twins, you’re so happy, you don’t think about the cost. That’s true of twin babies, but it’s not true with twin data centers.

On yesterday’s webinar with Gil Chaouat, we had an interesting discussion. Gil discussed a global company with which he had recently met. The company has two data centers in every region. Two data centers per region is a common approach for organizations like this one, that want to deliver a zero data loss environment. There were two things that really stood out for me:

1. Two data centers per region is really expensive
2. One is sometimes better than two

For this particular company, one of the biggest costs, in addition to the cost of the second data center in every region, was the cost of the high-speed fiber connections between each of the two data centers. And, of course, because fiber connections can break, they had to have two. Twice the cost. They used fiber connections, because they wanted synchronous data replication. It was the only way they could deliver zero data loss. So why is one data center better than two?

This company had no replication between regions. That would have added even more cost, and they wanted to reduce spending, not increase it. And replication between regions, which for them would have been North America to Europe and Europe to Asia, can only be done asynchronously, which means they will lose data in a disaster.

What they are discussing is eliminating the second data center and implementing Axxana’s black box. That way they can use asynchronous replication over IP lines between regions, eliminate the cost of the redundant fiber links, and use Axxana to deliver zero data loss. Doing this also ensures zero data loss in regional disasters, disasters which might have impacted both data centers in one region. So in this scenario, one is better than two.

Of course, when it comes to babies, two is better than one.

Three Factors for a Perfect Disaster Recovery Solution

I hope you have already had a chance to watch the video of Tim Hays, Vice President of IT at Animal Health International talking about why he chose Axxana. If not, please stop reading now and go watch it. Here’s the link.

If you listened to Tim, you’ll know that he chose Axxana because of three factors:

1. Axxana improved his recovery capabilities
2. Axxana integrated with his existing EMC CLARiiON, VNX, and RecoverPoint infrastructure
3. Axxana cost him less than historical methods of synchronous replication

Animal Health International is representative of  thousands and thousands of cost-conscious organizations. They know how large, global institutions are protecting their data, but in Tim’s words, with these traditional methods of synchronous replication, “The cost of the equipment, the cost of the telecommunications for synchronous I/O were just not at a cost level we were willing to support.” And with Axxana, Animal Health International gets an even higher level of data protection at a dramatically lower cost.

Tim recognizes that some companies have already made a very large investment in traditional synchronous replication. Often those companies chose an expensive synchronous solution, because at the time of the decision, there were no lower-cost alternatives available. Besides, many were require by law or regulation to have the highest levels of data protection, as, for example, in the financial services industry.  For those companies, Tim says,  ”Here’s an opportunity…to reduce those costs.”

The fact is, these organizations already have their processes in place, and few organizations like to disrupt a process that is working, even if it is costly. That’s OK with us. Eventually, those organizations will recognize the our approach not only lowers cost, but provides superior disaster recovery capabilities. In the meantime, we’ll be plenty busy serving the needs of organizations like Animal Health International.