SAN/iQ® DIsaster Recovery Planning

In the wake of multiple natural disasters in 2005, companies are taking a magnifying lens to their plans for disaster recovery. The real possibility a disaster could erase valuable data assets and that a DR solution would save these assets has taken the forefront in future planning for many small and mid-tier businesses. In fact, according to Jon Toigo, a well-known industry analyst, "Companies denied access to mission-critical data for longer than 48 hours tend not to exist after one year. Those who plan have a four-times greater chance of survival than those who don't."

Choose to Save Money

Your business can easily avoid becoming a statistic. With the LeftHand SAN, you have unmatched flexibility to create the right DR solution for your company and your IT staff. You get a choice of Open iSCSI SAN platforms, allowing you to select the right capacity and performance functionality for your environment. Install our patented easy-to-manage SAN/iQ Remote Copy and you’ll achieve a combination snapshot and remote copy application designed to deliver a simple and flexible solution to maintain multiple copies of data, with almost real-time concurrency. You’ll have the flexibility to determine per volume what data is copied to your remote site. Plus, unlike many DR solutions on the market, you don’t need to mirror capacities between sites, which means you can create an initial DR solution with a single cluster-ready storage module in each location and then scale as you need.

SAN/iQ’s flexibility continues to deliver benefits once you implement the DR solution. You’ll save capacity and bandwidth through SAN/iQ Remote Copy which only copies changed blocks of information. No dedicated storage pool is required, so there is no unnecessary waste of valuable storage space.

SAN/iQ Remote Copy delivers several more features that reduce required bandwidth. If anything interrupts the data transfer, SAN/iQ Remote Copy only needs to start from the last 10th percentile, saving valuable time and money. SAN/iQ’s easy-to-use GUI allows users to adjust how much bandwidth is assigned to remote site data transfers. Plus, users have the ability to leverage data compression technology from partners such as Juniper Networks to increase efficiency.

Ease of Management

Every day, the IT projects add on, stretching your staff’s workload. With the LeftHand SAN and SAN/iQ Remote Copy, you can spend your time creating best practices and a strong DR plan rather than managing data. Finding a file from three weeks ago will seem like a miracle to users but you will know it only took five minutes to locate and mount. If disaster does strike, you’ll keep your business online and functional without user interruption. And all of this is set up on a single screen and then managed through the intuitive centralized management console. The LeftHand SAN utilizes your existing IP infrastructure, so initially setting up the solution requires little to no re-wiring or expensive infrastructure changes.

Advanced Options for Data Protection

SAN/iQ Remote Copy in combination with the other high availability features of the LeftHand SAN allow you to build a fully redundant environment:

• SAN/iQ Network RAID within a main data center will ensure multiple copies of data are always available to protect against loss of any component of the SAN.
• Scheduled snapshots allow an administrator to perform a file-level restore in the case of accidental deletion or a full rollback to a point in time if data should become corrupted.
• SAN/iQ Remote Copy will copy the snapshots to a geographically separate site, making the data is available at the secondary site if anything should happen to the data center.
• Use tape backups at the secondary site to alleviate the load from the primary network at the data center
• LeftHand's Solution Pack for Microsoft Windows supports Microsoft's frameworks including Volume Shadow Copy Service (VSS), Microsoft’s Virtual Disk Service (VDS), and Multi-Path I/O (MPIO) to increase SAN ease-of-management and performance when businesses use the LeftHand SAN in conjunction with a Windows environment.