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SANs Offer Cost-Efficient Disaster Recovery Option
With mid-market storage area network (SAN) costs declining and their capabilities improving, they are becoming attractive disaster recovery (DR) options, say the experts. By utilizing SAN technology, any compatible server box can be booted to any configuration. This means a DR server can be a completely different make and model than a production server. By comparison, a traditional hosted DR infrastructure must be an exact duplicate of a production environment.
"Since the point of DR is short-term utilization, you can gain efficiencies by deploying a higher-performing SAN in production and lower-performing SAN in DR," says Bob Guilbert, managing director at Eze Castle Integration. "In the meantime, you're not paying for high-performance equipment that you're not using."
The catch? You must have a SAN at both the production and DR sites, Guilbert relates. The SANs synchronize with each other and, when necessary, the DR SAN is activated as the production system, he explains.
Anne Rawland Gabriel is a technology writer and marketing communications consultant based in the Minneapolis/St. Paul metro area. Among other projects, she's a regular contributor to UBM Tech's Bank Systems & Technology, Insurance & Technology and Wall Street & Technology ... View Full Bio