colocation & outsourcing
RECOVERY POSITION
Remote site disaster recovery rarely goes as smoothly as planned, eroding precious hours as operations
unravel and reveal complex failures. Stuart Gilks of SimpliVity explains how entrenched roadblocks are
being overcome through advances in data virtualisation and hyperconvergence.
M
anaging and
protecting remote
site data from a
central location can
be challenging.
Inter-office bandwidth constraints and
dependencies between the hardware
and software infrastructure frequently
cripple disaster recovery performance,
and complex multi-vendor installations
require specialist knowledge and tools
to manage and troubleshoot.
However recent advances in data
efficiency and abstraction now make
it possible to manage infrastructure
servers at the VM level and achieve
a level of data protection previously
unobtainable for a globally active
company without multi-national
scale investment.
Take for example a financial
services SME with multiple locations
worldwide, whose application runs on
a high transaction rate database. This
application cannot be centralised and
must be run locally at the individual
remote sites to ensure predictable
and peak application performance
needs are met. To protect this
data centrally, the global team
must be able to manage remote
infrastructure from a single
pane of glass, the WAN must
be capable of delivering the
bandwidth required, and the RPOs
and RTOs must be met while keeping
costs under control.
WAN optimisation
Let’s look at the WAN challenge
first. For many organisations the
cost of bandwidth needed to move
whole data sets between a primary
data centre and a secondary site is
prohibitive. Those that have interoffice connectivity still struggle
with prolonged operations that
result in back up failures and
compromises such as overreliance
on local back ups and insufficient
RPOs. Thankfully WAN optimisation
changes the economics of siteto-site data transfer for those that
choose to invest.
Data volume is acutely felt during
back ups and WAN transfers, but
Managing and protecting remote site data
from a central location can be challenging.
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