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GCN Home > November 5, 2001 issue

A SAN with a plan

Fibre Channel’s flexibility proves valuable in the face of disaster

By Kevin Jonah, Special to GCN

Recent events have heightened IT managers’ awareness of the importance of disaster recovery measures. Storage area network technology can be a big aid in ensuring the continued availability of critical data, particularly when combined with high-speed wide area networks.

One example of the resilience of Fibre Channel tunneling over IP was seen outside the government sector, at a company severely affected by the terrorist attacks on Sept. 11.

ESpeed Inc., the technology subsidiary of bond trading company Cantor Fitzgerald LP of New York, lost relatively little data when its data center on the 103rd floor of the World Trade Center’s north tower was destroyed in the building’s collapse.

The company was able to restore enough of its electronic trading applications in time for the opening of the U.S. bond market less than two days later. The reason: a combination of Fibre Channel tuneling and software data replication between the primary data center at One World Trade Center and an off-site data center in northern New Jersey. Data was also replicated to a data center overseas.

Data protection

SAN technology also made it possible to scale up the backup media resources at the New Jersey facility from tapes kept off-site, in order to restore nearly 100 servers in two days.

The majority of government agencies don’t have the same operational requirements as the bond market—no downtime ever—but their similar requirement for redundancy is a leading reason for SAN deployment.

Supercomputing programs and defense and law enforcement databases need to be resilient when a major component fails. But managers also need to protect a whole set of computing assets against communications outages or other kinds of interruptions, not the least of which are natural or manmade disasters.

Innovations such as extending Fibre Channel networks through the use of repeaters and Fibre Channel tunneling over IP can disperse IT assets without compromising the performance of applications. Let’s be realistic: That’s a feature that will continue to be in high demand.
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