Infrastructure
When an application or server is damaged or destroyed, data loss
is inevitable. Unless the lost information is recovered
seamlessly, system failures costing as much as 6.4 million dollars
per hour (source: contingencyplanningresearch.com) may occur. In
an effort to minimize the financial impact a system outage has on
a company's shareholders, law makers are enacting legislation that
will establish more exacting standards for disaster preparedness.
For forward-thinking businesses, the challenge is clear: reduce
risk while minimizing the cost of compliance.
In the past, companies were forced to rely on inefficient or
incomplete disaster recovery strategies that resulted in recovery
times as long as seven days (source: Nortel Networks). Even
powerful technologies, such as storage clustering, could only
partially address this challenge. And, while clusters did improve
recovery time by enabling a data center to reconstruct lost
information using replicated data stored on redundant machines,
the maximum effective distance between clustered devices was
limited. As a result, mission-critical data remained vulnerable
to major disasters that affected the entire facility.
Recognizing these challenges, Sun began approaching data
management in an entirely new way. Rather than relying on any one
storage technology operating independently, Sun built an
extensible storage solution capable of running several
applications (for example, point-in-time copy, remote replication,
and remote archiving to tape or disk) in combination. The
solution, based on the powerful N1 architecture, reduces
enterprise storage complexity by combining multiple data centers
into one virtual data services delivery system. And, because N1
is a fully transparent open architecture, information can be
shared among multiple devices more efficiently- even when running
across heterogeneous systems. If a service interruption does
occur, the virtually connected storage devices can identify,
reallocate, and restore vital data at a moment's notice.
As development continued, Sun data management specialists expanded
the solution to accommodate businesses that wished to increase
data availability over longer distances. Employing Dense Wave
Division Multiplexer (DWDM) technology and an active/active data
continuance configuration proven to reduce time to recovery, the
designers successfully created a powerful new business continuity
model that enables companies to locate cluster nodes in separate
locations within a wide geographic area (up to 200 km apart) - all
without changing the software infrastructure, applications, or
data.