Critical Pieces of the Disaster Recovery Puzzle

If your like most of our clients, you get so busy doing what really matters like getting keeping your network optimized, managing your critical servers, keeping mail flowing, phones working, and all of the other day to day complications of today's Information Technology infrastructure. Despite the potentially severe impact lost data can have on a business, keeping proper backups and building a disaster recovery is often neglected.

Recently, new emerging products have been coming out to deal with Storage and backup requirements, and if you haven’t had a chance to think about it, here’s the jist: Equallogic has a SAN that is everything a customer is looking for when it comes to data storage and more importantly backups.

The device has a built-in software set that allows for set-it and forget-it deployments of offsite backups. Basically, it automatically creates a second set of every bit of data across the network. The eSATA and iSCSI offerings allow for high speed availability.Equallogic is trailblazing the SAN world and we are fortunate to have them in DSW’s repertoire.

Despite its importance, often the costs involved in setting up a DR solution cannot be justified. Things to think about are the cost of the SAN, the cost of the WAN connection, space availability, rack space rental and bandwidth in a collocation facility.

For this reason, Cisco introduced WAAS (Wide Area Application Services) which in a very basic description zips a file on one end of the WAN and unzips it on the other side saving the pipe a significant amount of congestion and allowing for the data to move on a smaller amount of bandwidth. Coupled with a proper SAN solution, WAAS is a great fit in data mirroring.

The software involved is Wide Area File Services Software (WAFS). Users at branch offices can take advantage of a LAN-like experience when accessing files over the WAN and you can consolidate all branch-office data into central file servers in your data center.

More information on these cutting edge DR technologies can be seen at http://www.equallogic.com/ and www.cisco.com/go/waas