This white paper address the challenges that IT professionals face when implementing a geographically distributed data configuration and the features that a comprehensive replication solution must provide to answer these challenges.
IT Challenges in the Business Continuity Market September 2005
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Contents
Introduction __________________________________________________ 1 Terminology __________________________________________________ 2 IT Challenges in the Business Continuity Market _____________________ 3 Overcoming the Hurdles with WANSync ____________________________ 6 WANSync Products ___________________________________________ 17 Summary ___________________________________________________ 17
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Introduction In a world that relentlessly conducts business around the clock, information system managers must be prepared to ensure continuous access to business-critical applications and data. Business Continuity is a relatively new term that is often thought of as another way to say "disaster recovery", but in reality means much more. Business Continuity represents the seamless, uninterrupted provision of operations and services. An application or service that is "continuously available" must be able to tolerate virtually any cause of failure within the system. Geological events, severe weather, physical and cyber terrorism, strained or underdeveloped infrastructures - all may cause failure at a data center, regardless of its design. The only viable solution to these potential problems is to separate the data centers sufficiently (100 kilometers or more), as to ensure that a disaster at the primary location does not directly affect the secondary location(s). To ensure further protection, the continuity infrastructure must be designed to perform automatic failover in the event of disaster. According to the market research firm Ovum, companies once exhibiting reluctance in establishing a central control facility for all their mission-critical applications will be proactively reviewing their options. There will be an increase in demand for linking these facilities together through telecom networks and for guaranteed data synchronization. The IT trend will be towards more data centers, backup and data continuity systems. This brings into focus the increasing importance of data distribution and synchronization, generally referred to as "replication", over the Wide Area Network (WAN). This white paper will present the challenges that IT professionals face when implementing a geographically distributed data configuration in their network, and the features that a comprehensive replication solution must implement to answer these challenges.
XOsoft White Paper - IT Challenges in the Business Continuity Market Page 1
Terminology First, we will define some of the terms used throughout this document.
Application A computer in a client/server environment that performs the business Server logic (data processing). The application server is part of a three-tier application, consisting of a graphical user interface (GUI) server, an application (business logic) server, and a database and transaction server.
Database Server A computer dedicated to database storage and retrieval. It holds the database management system (DBMS) and the databases. Upon request from client computers, the database server searches the database for selected records and returns them over the network. File Server A computer attached to a network that stores the programs and data files shared by large number of users. It acts like a remote disk drive. The difference between a file server and an application server is that the file server stores the programs and data, while the application server runs the programs and processes the data.
Journaling Keeping track of events by recording them in a journal, or log.
Master The host computer on which original files reside and on which replication events start. Production Server See Master.
Recovery The combination of manual and machine procedures that can restore lost data in the event of hardware or software failure. Registry The Windows NT/2000 configuration se... [download for more]
