Riverbed: How to improve disaster recovery for the enterprise: Advanced replication powered by WAN optimization
Posted on Feb 22, 2012 11:01:52 AM
Today’s distributed and dynamic enterprises rely increasingly on 24×7 access to a growing set of mission-critical business applications and sensitive data. These applications and data are more distributed than ever: they can reside in corporate datacenters, remote offices, and/or on user computers. In addition, overall data volumes are growing rapidly in every industry segment, and widespread virtualization means that servers and data are more mobile than ever before. Moreover, IT operations teams are struggling with flat or shrinking budgets in a tough economy. These combined challenges make disaster recovery (DR) planning more difficult than it has been in the past, but they also make it more important than ever.
In order to meet current demands for application and data availability, successful enterprises are increasingly relying on the wide-area network (WAN) as a storage transport resource for DR.
This enables DR operations to be centralized —reducing redundancy and lowering overhead—and to leverage innovative disk-based backup and replication technologies offered by the leading storage vendors.
Decentralized, tape-based DR strategies are simply too costly and labor-intensive.
In practice, they fail to meet the recovery time and recovery point objectives (RTOs/RPOs) demanded by companies facing increasingly stringent customer service and regulatory requirements.
In this profile we examine the business and technology trends that complicate and increase the cost of enterprise-wide DR planning, and we summarize the proven benefits of disk-to-disk backup and replication technologies.
We then dive deeper, and explore the critical role WAN optimization plays in unlocking DR efficiencies when deployed along with these data protection solutions.
WAN optimization enables the enterprise to do more with its current network capacity—more frequent and faster backups and replication, plus faster recovery— while leveraging new capacity quickly and efficiently.
We conclude that a WAN optimization solution, when combined with advanced replication technologies, delivers remarkable flexibility, performance, and cost benefits for multi- datacenter enterprise disaster recovery.
This Riverbed white paper looks at:
• The limitations of traditional disaster recovery
• Current industry trends further complicate disaster recovery
• New technologies present additional challenges
• Server virtualization and worklod mobility
• Storage virtualization and data protection
• Cloud computing and storage elasticity
• Who should explore WAN optimization
• What does WAN optimization deliver
• How does WAN optimization work