How WAN Optimization Can Transform Disaster Recovery

Sonal Puri is vice president of Marketing & Sales for Aryaka

Sonal-Puri-tn

The old fashioned paradigm of single site disaster recovery (DR) assets standing idle has been given a radical makeover with the adoption of cloud. Stagnant DR assets are now morphing into real-time data replication.

The cloud has become the next logical step in the evolution of data protection. Disk-based backup had made data protection solutions a superior alternative to physical tape to more efficiently move data between sites. One of the biggest challenges to ensure real-time data replication has been the ability to transport large data-sets across geographies within an acceptable time period.

Now, a new class of Wide Area Network (WAN) optimization technology leverages an intelligent network in the cloud to bring higher performance and greater flexibility – an alternative solution that is now financially viable for all global organizations, irrespective of their size. WAN optimization as-a-Service means that the modern enterprise, with its distributed workforce teams and multiple site locations, can affordably address backup, archiving and disaster recovery needs from site-to-site and on-premise to cloud. What have traditionally been considered application, storage, backup, archiving or disaster roles are now converged into a single solution.

Smart organizations are already leveraging the cloud – with its elasticity and flexibility – to converge disaster recovery and data replication. They are no longer forced to have assets at one end sitting idle waiting for a disaster to happen. Enterprises can turn to WAN optimization as-a-Service for a holistic data protection solution which includes the ability to provide real-time replication across geographies that is simple and affordable even to the small- and medium-size business (SMB) market.

Enterprises are using additional capacity for data replication between two or more sites, and, in the event of disaster, can spin up compute assets in secondary sites or in the cloud, on demand. Organizations can reuse expensive, single-use disaster recovery backup sites for other business activities, essentially turning idle data center assets into active resources.

Cloud Evolution

The cloud has redefined architectural approaches to optimizing the enterprise wide area networks (WAN) as the third piece to compute and storage - intelligent networks - have sprung up, purpose built to optimize application performance. These dedicated, intelligent networks drastically increase throughput to reduce the time required as well as the amount of data transmitted between data centers and on-premise to cloud services. Using the compression, deduplication, Quality of Service (QoS) and TCP optimization technologies that are the cornerstones of these optimization solutions, enterprises can experience significant performance gains when replicating data globally. That’s because the distance between data centers is no longer a constraint to data replication, network backup and disaster recovery.

WAN optimization as-a-Service accelerates existing backup technologies and provides faster access to cloud storage providers through a dedicated secure network with built-in optimization technology to deliver rapid data retrieval and replication across locations and to the cloud, providing an off-site storage location for disaster recovery. Enterprises can optimize all data protection applications including NetApp SnapMirror, Oracle Data Guard, Symantec Backup Exec and NetBackup, Microsoft Data Protection Manager (DPM), Teradata Backup Recovery and Restore (BAR), and more.

Disaster Recovery & Data Replication

The convergence of disaster recovery and data replication brings many benefits to the enterprise including shorter back-up windows, increased reliability, faster recovery times, increased backup frequency and easy site-to-site replication. Companies seeking zero data loss and time loss can achieve real-time data replication for enhanced efficiency and decreased business risk. Real-world use cases have demonstrated the following results:

Companies seeking database synchronization across data centers reduce backup windows and transfer times to maximize application availability. Real customer benefits include:

What this means is a renaissance in backup and recovery. The term “data protection” has come to replace what people used to call “backup.”  In fact, backup, archiving and disaster recovery are no longer treated as separate activities by the IT organization. The performance and flexibility of the cloud further enables organizations to make better use of DR assets. Rather than stand idly by, single site DR assets are morphing into business accelerators.

Industry Perspectives is a content channel at Data Center Knowledge highlighting thought leadership in the data center arena. See our guidelines and submission process for information on participating. View previously published Industry Perspectives in our Knowledge Library.