Remote sites: an answer to the headaches?
In practice three different approaches dominate: a fully centralised architecture with all resources in a single location (typically the headquarters), a fully decentralised architecture with locally-based resources at each site or a combination of the two. But in many companies remote sites lack the equipment and the IT skills necessary to ensure adequate protection of enterprise data, and critical data is at risk. A range of solutions has been developed to help the DSI regain control of business-critical data at remote sites.
Wide-area file systems
With the introduction of their Wide Area File Services solution (WAFS, now integrated into the WAAS solution) several years ago Cisco combined a WAN-based file system and cache-based bandwidth optimisation in a single product. Files from remote sites were copied to the central site where the appropriate data protection processes could be applied. Other vendors followed Cisco's lead with variable results. An example is WAN optimisation vendor Riverbed developing its own WAFS offering. Market take-up, however, hasn't lived up to expectations; the need to install yet another appliance at every remote site seems to be the sticking point for many enterprises.
Virtualisation
Server consolidation and rapid deployment of new services both centrally and at remote sites with fully centralised system administration – what is there not to like about virtualisation? And there's more; disaster recovery planning with rapid failover is facilitated, and network optimisation solutions reduce bandwidth overheads making it easy to remotely managed virtualised systems. That said, virtualisation is not without it's own overheads and becomes difficult to justify when fewer than a dozen physical servers are to be consolidated. Few remote offices will have this many servers. Overall the virtualisation approach quickly becomes expensive where there's a large number of remote sites to protect.
Backup and high availability – the winning team?
To ensure adequate protection for all business data, A leading express carrier turned to Double-Take Software. With a low number of servers at many sites, virtualisation-based solutions weren't cost-effective, and the overheads of site-by-site equipment deployment ruled out a WAFS-type approach. What the express carrier wanted was a simple, transparent solution backing-up and replicating data and workloads in real time for each remote office. By combining Double-Take® Availability and Double-Take® Backup, the carrier achieves its aims of real time workload replication and backup with rapid restoration for every site. Byte-level replication takes place in real time over any WAN connection using data compression technologies. The Double-Take Software solution supports automatic failover for any server, with no requirement for manual intervention, so that system administrators do not need to travel to remote sites to restart systems.
To find out more about Double-Take Software solution for remote sites, ask for the “Double Take for Remote Offices/Small Offices (ROBO)” datasheet by sending an email to mguerrero@doubletake.com or fsvartz@doubletake.com. |
|
October release for Hyper-V R2
A few weeks ago Microsoft announced the release of Windows Server 2008 R2 simultaneously with Windows 7, next October. The two operating systems are now tightly coupled. On the server side R2 introduces a number of new features for Hyper-V, in particular Cluster Shared Volumes (CSV). CSV allows cluster nodes to share access to storage, where previously only one node could “own” a LUN (and all its applications and data) at any time. The result is easier cluster deployment, system/application migration, and failover. Another key new feature is Live Migration, the long-awaited response to VMware's VMotion, allowing “hot” migration of virtual systems. Finally the possibility of booting directly from a VHD reduces the number of disk images that need to be stored.
Double-Take® for Hyper-V provides business continuity protection for Hyper-V virtual systems, with real-time local and remote replication and failover. Automatic discovery and real time provisioning features mean Double-Take for Hyper-V allows you to effectively test your business continuity capability in real time. |
|
