Category: Inmage

Synchronous replication may be viewed by users as the “Gold’ standard when it comes to achieving the highest levels of application availability for business continuity and disaster recovery. But as I previously discussed, using synchronous replication for business continuity and disaster recovery can actually take longer and cost more for organizations to remotely recover applications than if they use asynchronous replication. Now organizations can use asynchronous software like InMage Systems Scout to deliver the same or better results as synchronous replication at a substantially lower cost.

Synchronous replication is a technology that organizations often view as synonymous with the highest levels of application availability. In fact, a SearchStorage article entitled WAN Mirroring and Replication written a little over a year ago even makes the assertion that organizations using synchronous replication can achieve recovery point objectives (RPOs) that remain near zero with recovery time objectives (RTOs) typically on the order of minutes. But is this assertion about synchronous replication really true and under what circumstances? And is it possible that asynchronous replication can actually deliver better RPOs and RTOs over a WAN for disaster recovery (DR) than synchronous replication?

Replication software is increasingly entering the conversation as the logical replacement for backup software in client environments. Yet replicating data is really the easy part. Integrating the replication software so it becomes part of the fabric of a company’s infrastructure is a far more difficult task. It is also one of the reasons that replication software has, to date, made so little headway in terms of displacing backup software for enterprise wide data protection. But as replication software matures, that will change.

In a previous blog, Dr. James Tu, the Information Security Officer at a real estate services company, discussed how he had sought out an affordable and workable enterprise-wide disaster recovery solution from an uneven landscape of replication products and found one that met his needs right under his nose. By turning on a feature in InMage Systems’ Profiler which he had previously obtained to measure data change rates on his application servers, he converted it into InMage Systems’ fully functioning replication software, Scout. But now he still had to assess how well Scout would fit into his existing infrastructure and then build the business case to justify it.

The road to recovery is a journey that more organizations are embarking upon as they start to look beyond just successfully backing up their data and instead focus on cost-effectively recovering their business. Yet as organizations begin this journey, they find that that the road to recovery is strewn with obstacles and is neither well-traveled nor well-marked. This was the dilemma that recently confronted Dr. James Tu, the Information Security Officer at a real estate services company, who was seeking to carve out an affordable and workable enterprise-wide disaster recovery solution from an uneven landscape of replication products.

One of the more critical pieces of information that organizations need as they put together a disaster recovery plan is how much data they have in their environment and how quickly it is changing. The reason this information is so important is that without it, organizations often have no way to effectively size how much or what type of capacity they need to protect and recover their production data. In fact, I was astonished at how little information this was available about this topic or the fact that there were so few good articles on the subject.

There is an abundance of negativity in the market place right now but most companies are still planning to keep their doors open in 2009 and beyond which means they still plan to spend money, albeit more frugally than before. Granted, companies are taking a hard look at every line item in the budget and cutting the fat but that is not necessarily a bad thing. If anything, companies are using this as a time to introduce new technologies to solve long standing business problems and one issue that appears high on their priority list for 2009 is recovery software.

“We’re all doomed!” That phrase appeared in a recent Computerworld headline and encapsulates the feelings that some individuals are having during this current economic crisis. While the headline goes on to conclude that the end of the world is probably not at hand, the text of the article explains that many companies are experiencing financial troubles and need to shift gears in terms of how they act during this economic downturn. Among the actions that the author recommends a company should pursue is taking the time to evaluate every supplier and only pursue those that deliver results for the company. But what are the benchmarks by which companies should measure these results and how are these results measured when it comes to technology?

Many of the clients I work with are taking a closer look at their data protection solutions. Currently much of their focus is on trying to decide between purchasing additional storage (disk or tape), replication licensing, or deduplicating virtual tape library (VTL) technologies. The trouble is there are so many data protection products that the selection process becomes extraordinarily complex. So while companies may think of data protection as a singular function or strategy, companies will employ multiple strategies, staff and point products in order to attain a form of universal data protection.