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Affordable Remote Data Replication
Your Data is as Valuable as
Anyone's
You know very well how critical your data is to your organization
and how much your business would be impacted were that data
to become unavailable because of a major IT outage.
Organizations typically rely on traditional tape backup to
guard against this eventuality. More comprehensive disaster
recovery (DR) solutions that automatically maintain up-to-date
copies of data at a remote location are desirable, but are
often unaffordable for two reasons. Either the solutions require
very expensive equipment on both ends, or they require modifications
to every host with critical data. The former is beyond the
scope of the small to medium sise enterprise, the latter is
host-invasive, complex and difficult to manage.
Now, however, DataCore has introduced an affordable, low cost
but effective solution that brings real centralised DR capability
within the reach of any organization, no matter how small.
Our SANmelody™ shrink-wrap package converts a PC server
into a "Disk Server" whose added disk capacity and
data protection features are accessible by application servers
(email, web, database etc) over an Ethernet LAN or Fibre Channel
SAN. From a DR perspective, the Disk Server may be configured
to automatically and transparently replicate critical data
from any of the servers to remote site.
Replication Using Your Existing
Assets
A standard Windows server can be converted into a dedicated
Disk Server in minutes by installing DataCore's SANmelody
software. The resultant Disk Server can then be used to serve
disk space over the LAN to business critical application servers
in your network. The additional disk space appears to be coming
from additional internal disk drives. By adding the SANmelody
Asynchronous IP Mirror (AIM) Replication option, you can replicate
any of these Disk Server volumes to a distant Disk Server
whether it be hundreds of yards or hundreds of miles away;
Only a conventional IP LAN or WAN is required to connect the
two sites.
Replication of data is fully automatic and, once initial synchronization
is complete, only changes to the data are transmitted, keeping
network traffic (and transmission costs) to a minimum.
Easy to Manage Disaster Recovery
Configuration
One of the major advantages of the SANmelody approach is that,
unlike host-based solutions, the replication of data is focused
on and performed by collaborating SANmelody Disk Servers.
This means that there is no need to install resource-hungry
and costly software on each of your business servers.
Because the SANmelody Disk Server manages the underlying storage
for your business servers, it becomes a central point of control
for those volumes. When an application updates a Disk Server
managed volume configured for automatic replication, the SANmelody
software will also transmit the data blocks to the remote
site. This simplifies management, as there is only one point
of administration, rather than having to configure each application
server separately to achieve the same goal.
Replication is performed for only those volumes you choose
so data transmission can be kept to a minimum. Changes to
the configuration, such as enabling new business servers to
exploit the Disk Server and replicating additional volumes,
can be carried out at any time non-disruptively, creating
an easily managed and expandable DR environment.
Easy Recovery of Data
Should disaster strike one of your critical servers, or application
data corruption occur, you can be confident that the remote
replica of your data can be used for recovery purposes. This
can be achieved in many ways. The simplest is to combine asynchronous
replication with SANmelody's Snapshot option to capture point-in-time
images at the remote site that you can fall back to.
Furthermore, by integrating the remote Disk Server with your
existing backup software and SANmelody Snapshot you can automatically
trigger tape backup at the remote location creating an offsite
vault for your backup tapes without the need for expensive
and time consuming courier services.
Underlying High Performance
and Robust Technology
By using SANmelody Disk Servers as the basis for a low cost
DR solution, you are taking advantage of the best price /
performance alternative on the market today. Industry benchmarks
and customer experiences have shown that DataCore's software
running on off-the-shelf servers outperforms conventional
proprietary storage arrays and at a fraction of their price.
Further Advanced Options When
You Need Them
Other optional SANmelody Disk Server modules address advanced
features such as redundant disk servers, Fibre Channel host
connections and auto-provisioning. Any of these advanced features
can be added when the need arises.
Copyright DataCore
Software, reproduced with permission. |
