Data Centers Need Business Continuity Solutions

The Cost of Data Center Failure
A networked data center strategy addresses one of the most critical factors in any disaster-ready storage environment: the ability to recover data and quickly bring systems back online following a disaster. Disaster Recovery (DR) sites are located at increasing distances from the central data center to be closer to energy sources to cut costs while at the same time to be far enough away from the center site to ensure protection in the event of a catastrophic natural disaster. Internet applications and global business practices have established the 24-hour business day, severely restricting the amount of downtime available to perform regular data backup procedures. And even minutes of downtime can pose significant consequences to many types of organizations.

For today's enterprise data centers, business continuity / disaster recovery is a mandatory requirement, if not for regulatory compliance then for company survival. Whether downtime costs thousands or millions of dollars per hour, a prolonged data outage leaves a company vulnerable to competition, depreciation of brand, and loss of customers. One of the persistent challenges for IT administrations then is to create a workable BC/DR plan that is always under constant pressure from budgetary constraints and the steady growth of data requiring protection.

The business continuity solution needs to:

• Eliminate single points of failure to increase system resiliency and maximize data availability
• Incorporate failover software to prevent or better tolerate system outages
• Streamline data backup and recovery processes to reduce the time to recovery
• Enable high-performance remote backup, electronic vaulting, and mirroring at data centers separated by great distances
• Comply with corporate regulatory compliance requirements
• Provide encryption for data in flight and at rest

The Extended Data Center
Over the past decade storage networking technology has developed a new set of products and protocols that facilitate practical implementation of today's BC/DR requirements. We are no longer bounded by distance or bandwidth restrictions and it is now possible to deploy business continuity solutions that span thousands of miles. Brocade SAN Routers, for example, are supporting DR installations that link sites in Japan to recovery centers on the US east coast and others that span the Atlantic from Europe to the US. These extremely long-distance data protection solutions were unthinkable 10 years ago.

Native Fibre Channel technology provides extended distance connectivity of up to 120 km. This distance enables enterprise customers to maintain geographically separate disaster recovery facilities or mirroring operations. When used as part of an extended data center fabric, SANs can utilize WANs or Metropolitan Area Networks (MANs) to cover even longer distances.

Continuous Data Protection
Continuous Data Protection (CDP) is a methodology that continuously captures or tracks data modifications and stores changes independent of the primary data, enabling recovery points from any point in the past. CDP solutions can be block based, file based or application based. Compared to tape backup or data replication, CDP offers much finer granularity and the ability to move the recovery point objective selectively backward in time.

• Success Stories

  • City of Beverly Hills: Streamlining Disaster Recovery (186.5 KB)

• White Papers

  • Brocade Network Monitoring Service (NMS) Helps Maximize Network Uptime and Efficiency (713 KB)

  • Data Protection: Understanding the Benefits of Various Data Backup and Recovery Techniques (198.9 KB)

  • Leveraging SaaS to Improve Application Availability and Proactive Management (349.8 KB)