Get Back Up and Running

There’s an old saying in the computer biz that, with respect to system crashes, it’s a question of when, not if. Whether the cause is a hardware malfunction, a software bug, or human interaction, it’s certain that your company’s computer system will one day come to grief. It’s a serious problem, because unless you’ve got adequate backup systems in place to deal with that inevitability, you’re putting your business at risk.

The flow of information is the key to any organization’s survival, especially in today’s volatile economic climate. When that flow comes to a halt-even for a short period of time-the effects can be catastrophic.

Depending on whose survey you read, the cost associated with downed networks and the unavailability of information is estimated at between tens of thousands to millions of dollars per hour. Downtime costs add up at a truly staggering pace, while at the same time confidence among customers and others who need your data erodes. In a one-month period in early 1999, for example, online trader E*Trade suffered four system outages. The result was a 22 per cent loss on the company’s stock price.

Ensuring that your system and data are available on a continuous basis is arguably the most critical business and organizational requirement today. That’s as true for a medium-sized business as for an industry giant.

How do you do it? Consider remote data mirroring.
Remote data mirroring means that all of your organization’s data is duplicated and maintained at a remote site, i.e., one separate from the primary computer system. If that primary system goes down, remote mirroring allows the system and its attendant applications to be restarted on the backup site.

Configured properly, the system will make a seamless transition, information flow will be virtually uninterrupted, and you can carry on doing business with few or no adverse effects.

Remote data mirroring can be implemented in one of two ways. Physical data mirroring is based on the reproduction of the primary system’s computer hardware. A physical data mirroring solution would be the appropriate choice when what matters most to you is system performance, the immediacy of your data, and the ease with which that data can be managed.

That’s because of a number of fairly basic realities rooted in the availability of power and space. A physical mirroring solution doesn’t consume a large amount of the primary system’s processing power or hard drive space, it allows duplication of software configurations independent of the disk technology used on the primary system, and it allows for speedy performance with multiple read devices on the remote site.

Logical mirroring reproduces the primary system’s software structure. It’s the better choice when your business priorities are about processing transactions on a consistent and ongoing basis. With a logical mirroring solution, possible corruption of the remote data is less likely to occur than in a physical mirroring setup. However, re-synchronizing the remote system usually requires manual intervention by your staff, and performance is usually slightly lower than with a physical mirroring solution.

Your choice will depend on how important is the immediacy of your duplicated data, and your business’s tolerance to some amount of data loss. The difference between the two options is simply a matter of relying on hardware versus software.

At first glance, remote data mirroring might seem to be something only a dedicated IT manager needs to think about.

However, if your business depends on the ongoing availability of information, such a solution might be the key to your business’s survival-the literal guarantee that life will go on, whatever mishaps may occur.