The VMware HCL listing for our NSS VA can be viewed here:
As I’ve mentioned before in previous blogs, the way I think about things changed after business school. Life was far simpler as an engineer. I enjoyed and appreciated products for their technology with no consideration for financial implications. I see an analogy between my current car situation and many of the customers I speak with on a regular basis, with regard to SANs. Should you buy a new SAN or enhance and maintain your existing, paid for, SAN?
Most storage vendors offer some type of volume copy functionality, either in-system or remote replication. These copy functions are commonly promoted as business continuity (in-system copy) or disaster recovery ( remote replication). Replication, or transporting data from one location to another, is analogous to household moving companies. They transport your entire household, in many boxes, to your new house. However, once all your household belongings are safely at your new home, you still have the complex and laborious task of unpacking and arranging things to make your new home functional. Isn’t this effectively what remote data replication does? Sure, all your data is safely at your remote data center, but now what? Where's the 'Recovery' aspect of this paradigm?
FalconStor has been developing data protection solutions for many years. We’ve also had remote replication capabilities for many years. Some of you may be aware of the unique nature of FalconStor remote replication. However, for anyone who is not I’d like to put some perspective into how, and why, FalconStor remote replication is the best in the industry.
The deployment complexity and ongoing costs of DR implementations sometimes cause SMBs and even large enterprises to postpone or limit their DR plans, resulting in the adoption of less expensive and less effective data protection tactics. Many DR plans today depend on restoring from backups! This dependence in itself is a disaster waiting to happen. Even a partial data center restore from tape will take days if not weeks. No business today can afford to shut down operations for a day, never mind a week! Here is a great source of information for DR planning and implementation.
But again what are the alternatives? When it comes to DR, the most basic process is data movement; this is why many organizations depend on tape to move data offsite, but this model will never provide rapid and effective DR execution. The other way is replication, the most expensive component of a DR plan. Data replication can be performed at the host, network or the storage layer, and each has its own advantages. In this post I’ll focus on storage layer replication, as it is the most common replication method for DR implementations.
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