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The needs of business today extend far beyond the data protection provided by traditional backup and restore - they require full 24/7/365 protection for true business continuity. Effective protection requires several layers, including mainstream technologies like RAID, tape backup, and snapshots along with online replication. But when disaster strikes, what is needed is true high availability, with recovery in seconds, and without the need for cumbersome and error-prone manual procedures. An adequate high availability solution must meet several key requirements, including simplicity, cost-effectiveness, application-awareness, flexibility and high performance.
We present a detailed description of the WANSyncHA architecture and operation, demonstrating that it has been carefully engineered not just to meet the minimum requirements, but in several cases to set new standards for ease of operation and management. In addition, WANSyncHA offers several unique capabilities, including installation without downtime, automatic detection of application failure, and failover across different networks.
Business Continuity Today
What is the proper concern of the IT department of a modern enterprise - protecting data or making sure that critical business processes that depend on IT applications and resources remain accessible and effective? The answer to that is obvious - the primary IT concern in the enterprise today is to ensure that the applications and information that drive critical business processes are available as soon as they are needed, whenever they are needed.
The costs of failure to do this are high. A recent study of 80 large organizations by Infonetics Research found that overall downtime costs averaged an astounding 3.6% of annual revenue! In another study, Forrester estimated the average cost of downtime for e-commerce sites at $8,000 per hour - at larger sites like eBay, Intel and Amazon, the costs soar to hundreds of thousands of dollars per hour. And research by Creative Networks, Inc. has shown that Microsoft Exchange downtime can easily cost thousands of dollars per hour in a mid-sized organization
The rapidly shrinking timescale of business today has forced an evolution of data protection and recovery needs into a much broader need for business continuity. The function of protection technology has evolved with it - the real task of data and application protection today is to mitigate the risks businesses face not just in loss of data, but in loss of access to that data and to the applications that use it.
No single technology is able to accomplish this goal - solid protection can only be achieved by layering solutions at different levels. Thus, mainstream data protection technologies like RAID, tape backup, and snapshots remain as critical in today's environment as ever - they provide the first and last lines of defense for the data itself. These technologies cannot, however, provide the ongoing access to data that you require - even with these protections, you risk hours of lost transactions and hours more of time to recover. Even with a replication solution, the procedures required to perform a manual switchover or recovery are time-consuming and highly error-prone. Only a true high-availability solution - continuous replication linked with a fully automated switchover capability - is adequate to the needs of frontline businesses today.
Not every high availability solution is adequate to the task. In the next section, we review the requirements that an effective solution must satisfy. In the remainder of the paper, we first review the WANSyncHA solution in some detail, then highlight the features that address the requirements. Finally, we briefly reiterate how WANSyncHA fits into a broader risk mitigation strategy for your organization.
Requirements for an Effective Solution
When selecting a product as part of an overall IT strategy, it is important to remember that technologies like data replication and automated switchover are not themselves solutions to business problems - they are only, at best, components of a solution to a business problem. The failure to understand this distinction has led to enormous losses of resources invested in IT over the last decade or so - companies have purchased one technology after another without fully understanding how the technology would actually provide a solution to the problems they faced.
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