Disaster Recovery Game Changer: From SAN-to-SAN to SAN-to-Cloud
Happy 5th of July!
We interrupt this holiday week to talk about how cloud services are expanding disaster recovery options for users of Storage Area Networks (SAN that is).
A traditional SAN-to-SAN disaster recovery scenario may rely on host-based replication technology transmitting data and applications between two mirror SAN environments. While this works for some firms, cloud technology presents a viable, cost-effective alternative where data and applications from a firm’s production SAN are replicated to a cloud environment for disaster recovery.
Using replication technology, such as NetApp’s SnapMirror, a firm’s production environment can be synchronized with a disaster recovery environment in a private cloud. By synchronizing operating systems, applications, and data, the cloud provider should be able to meet aggressive recovery point and recovery time objectives for the client.
Here are a few benefits of using a SAN-to-Cloud solution for disaster recovery:
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Multiple restore points provide more recovery options in both production and disaster recovery environments; Recover from data corruption with ease
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Reduced licensing costs results in cost savings as server numbers increase; Pay only for production licenses, which are replicated to the cloud DR environment
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Bandwidth efficient since only changed blocks are transmitted
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Periodic disaster recovery testing conducted with limited client involvement can be provided by cloud provider; Testing validates the DR solution and satisfies compliance audit DR requirements
While SAN-to-Cloud DR isn’t right for every firm, it make be advantages for firms that have a larger number of servers or anticipate serge growth at their production site to evaluate this DR deployment model.
