Data Recovery Services For Real-Time Disaster Recovery

Persistence Software can help companies reduce their disaster data recovery times from hours to seconds for mission-critical applications. The Persistence Data Services solution for real-time disaster recovery enables companies like Citigroup to gain competitive advantage by achieving cost-effective business continuity

Better Business Continuity A renewed focus on business continuity planning in the wake of 9/11 coincides with a tough economic climate, presenting IT decision makers with difficult budgeting choices. As regulators insist on faster recovery plans and customers increasingly expect 24×7 access, IT groups are questioning the adequacy of their disaster recovery solutions. For example, in August 2002, the US General Accounting Office (GAO) produced a report concluding that nine out of 15 “critical” financial organizations in the US still have serious business continuity issues.

In large part, these issues arise because traditional business continuity solutions, such as database replication or disk mirroring, each have serious drawbacks related to cost and time-to-recovery. Solution: Data Recovery Services Success Story A global financial institution based in the US trades over in equities daily. Any outage can result in significant revenue loss to the company, regulatory penalties, damage to customer relationships and loss of critical data. Because of this, the equities business unit established a requirement for zero downtime during trading hours.

To address this requirement, the bank evaluated disk mirroring and database replication solutions, but found they introduced unacceptable time lags and costs. With Persistence Software, this bank will be implementing Real-Time Disaster Recovery for their equities trading systems using a Data Services synchronization solution. The Data Services synchronization layer sits between the application servers and the data sources, transparently mirroring all update transactions to both data centers. Because both data centers are online, processing workload can be spread evenly across the centers. If a data center goes offline for any reason, the other data center immediately picks up processing.

Better Services Database replication and disk mirroring approaches require recovery site servers to be offline, introducing recovery time lags of 1 to 2 hours. In contrast, Facebook Data Services synchronization enables recovery sites to be continuously online. Benefits include:

• Enables real-time disaster recovery: Data Services synchronization reduces business continuity recovery.

• Eliminates distance limit on location: Data Services synchronization enables significantly wider separation between primary and recovery sites as recommended by the GAO report.

• Improves IT capacity: Data Services synchronization enables previously “dormant” recovery site servers to share in daily workload processing.