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Products | SANmelody | Application Scenarios | Disaster Recovery
Affordable Remote Data Replication Your Data is as Valuable as Anyone's You know very well how critical your data is to your organization and how much your business would be impacted were that data to become unavailable because of a major IT outage. Organizations typically rely on traditional tape backup to guard against this eventuality. More comprehensive disaster recovery (DR) solutions that automatically maintain up-to-date copies of data at a remote location are desirable, but are often unaffordable for two reasons. Either the solutions require very expensive equipment on both ends, or they require modifications to every host with critical data. The former is beyond the scope of the small to medium size enterprise, the latter is host-invasive, complex and difficult to manage. Now, however, DataCore has introduced an affordable, low cost but effective solution that brings real centralized DR capability within the reach of any organization, no matter how small. Our SANmelody™ shrink-wrap package converts a PC server into a "Disk Server" whose added disk capacity and data protection features are accessible by application servers (email, web, database etc) over an Ethernet LAN or Fibre Channel SAN. From a DR perspective, the Disk Server may be configured to automatically and transparently replicate critical data from any of the servers to remote site. 
Replication Using Your Existing Assets A standard Windows PC can be converted into a dedicated Disk Server in minutes by installing DataCore's SANmelody software. The resultant Disk Server can then be used to serve disk space over the LAN to business critical application servers in your network. The additional disk space appears to be coming from additional internal disk drives. By adding the SANmelody Asynchronous IP Mirror (AIM) Replication option, you can replicate any of these Disk Server volumes to a distant Disk Server whether it be hundreds of yards or hundreds of miles away; Only a conventional IP LAN or WAN is required to connect the two sites. Get more technical detail on how Asynchronous IP Mirroring (AIM) works. Replication of data is fully automatic and, once initial synchronization is complete, only changes to the data are transmitted, keeping network traffic (and transmission costs) to a minimum. Easy to Manage Disaster Recovery Configuration One of the major advantages of the SANmelody approach is that, unlike host-based solutions, the replication of data is focused on and performed by collaborating SANmelody Disk Servers. This means that there is no need to install resource-hungry and costly software on each of your business servers. Because the SANmelody Disk Server manages the underlying storage for your business servers, it becomes a central point of control for those volumes. When an application updates a Disk Server managed volume configured for automatic replication, the SANmelody software will also transmit the data blocks to the remote site. This simplifies management, as there is only one point of administration, rather than having to configure each application server separately to achieve the same goal. Replication is performed for only those volumes you choose so data transmission can be kept to a minimum. Changes to the configuration, such as enabling new business servers to exploit the Disk Server and replicating additional volumes, can be carried out at any time non-disruptively, creating an easily managed and expandable DR environment. Easy Recovery of Data Should disaster strike one of your critical servers, or application data corruption occur, you can be confident that the remote replica of your data can be used for recovery purposes. This can be achieved in many ways. The simplest is to combine asynchronous replication with SANmelody's Snapshot option to capture point-in-time images at the remote site that you can fall back to. Furthermore, by integrating the remote Disk Server with your existing backup software and SANmelody Snapshot you can automatically trigger tape backup at the remote location creating an offsite vault for your backup tapes without the need for expensive and time consuming courier services.
Underlying High Performance and Robust Technology By using SANmelody Disk Servers as the basis for a low cost DR solution, you are taking advantage of the best price / performance alternative on the market today. Industry benchmarks and customer experiences have shown that DataCore's software running on off-the-shelf servers outperforms conventional proprietary storage arrays and at a fraction of their price. Further Advanced Options When You Need Them Other optional SANmelody Disk Server modules address advanced features such as redundant disk servers, Fibre Channel host connections and auto-provisioning. Any of these advanced features can be added when the need arises. Download a pdf of this article.
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