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Mirroring / Data Integration
How important is data currency in the backup and restore functions
-- the answer will determine whether the mirroring should be
synchronous or asynchronous. What is the system's (and the
organization's) tolerances to some measure of data loss? Should the
solution have the ability to maintain changed data information if a
second fault event occurs? How can the recoverability of data at the
remote location be guaranteed?
More than ever before, businesses depend on information availability
and access. For most companies, losing access to their data for a
prolonged period of time will result in serious consequences and the
cost of systems and information unavailability can amount to
millions of dollars per hour
These downtime costs can add up at a truly staggering pace. In a
one-month period in early 1999, at the height of the dot-com bubble,
online trader E*Trade suffered four system outages. The result was a
22 per cent loss on the company's stock price. In June 1999,
Internet auction firm eBay was hit by 22 hours of operating system
failure. The costs? A revenue hit tagged at between $3 million and
$5 million, and a 26 per cent decline in the company's stock price.
Continuous system and data availability is arguably the most
critical business and organizational requirement today. Fast
recovery from failures and disasters is a logical corollary.
Uninterrupted availability is most commonly achieved by the presence
of redundant design, clustering and fail-over with software and
firmware support. The bottom line is that IT managers must ensure
all critical components are duplicated, so that system and
application availability is maintained in the event of any single
component failure.
For a speedy end to system downtime, and to facilitate resumption of
business in the face of disaster, the most common facility is the
use of remote data mirroring. This means that an exact copy of the
business' production data is maintained in a remote site. Should a
failure or disaster occur in the original production site, remote
mirroring can be used to restart the system and applications at the
remote site.
Remote data mirroring can take one of two forms: physical mirroring,
based on a replication of the original site's hardware, and logical
mirroring, based on a replication of the original system's file
structure.
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