Business continuity futures
- Article 2 of 2
- Business Continuity, March 2005
What new technologies should organisations look to to drive lower-costs and higher levels of business continuity?
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Over links of 25 miles or more, synchronous replication is impossible, since even lightspeed networking can match the speed at which data writes to disk. With two data centres located within this distance, it's possible for both to be destroyed if they're on the same flood plain for instance, and organisations with data centres in certain countries often want to have replicated data on another continent altogether.
Asynchronous replication has become possible in the last two years, through products such as EMC's Symmetric Remote Data Facility. However, the pioneer of asynchronous replication, HDS, has just begun to deploy products that use a disk journaling approach that is able to treat asynchronous storage identically to local storage, recording the changes made to data in journal files and periodically sending the changes to the alternative site at the request of the storage system there. Analyst firm Gartner says that while this approach is superior to other vendors', interoperability may be an issue.
Over time these technological incompatiblities will inevitably disappear as vendors match each other's efforts. Operating system vendors will also start to include replication facilities with their systems, effectively making replication a commodity. More and more application vendors will start to include failover clustering or similar facilities in their own products, mainly through licensing others' technology. It will then be the management and monitoring capabilities of vendors' products that will differentiate them, through the use of centralised administration consoles and autonomic features. Business continuity can only continue to become more important - and easier - as time and technology progress.
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