NEXT GENERATION BUSINESS CONTINUITY

While some powerful disaster recovery (DR) solutions are available on the market, many suffer important shortcomings.

High Cost

Most conventional disaster recovery solutions require expensive storage area networks, storage replication appliances and new infrastructure pairings.

DataGardens WAVE™ offers a much more flexible software–based solution, which supports direct-attached storage, traditional SAN attached storage, iSCSI attached storage, and mixed storage environments. There is no need to procure identical storage assets at the production and protection site. DataGardens offers “one-stop shopping,” providing live migration, rollback, failover/fail-back, and IP re-addressing in one comprehensive solution.

Limited Utility

Conventional DR systems do not reduce planned downtime and are only useful for a very small percentage of the causes of unplanned downtime.

DataGardens WAVE™ offers a significantly more flexible and versatile business continuity solution that can be utilized during both planned and unplanned downtime, regardless of the cause. DataGardens WAVE™ addresses not only site failures which rarely occur, but also addresses logical failures such as viruses and data corruption which occur much more frequently.

Poor Recovery from Corruption or Loss

Most unplanned downtime results from human or software error, resulting in corrupted data and system files. Traditional DR systems simply replicate corrupted data to a remote protection site.

DataGardens WAVE™ addresses the dominant causes of unplanned downtime by rolling back data volumes and active business processes a selected instant before the corruption occurred.

Manual Bring-Up Procedures

Conventional DR systems require a complicated series of manual processes before promoting standby infrastructure to production operation, such as redirecting client computers to newly activated servers and data volumes at the protection site.

Once the administrator has made the decision to migrate or failover infrastructure to a protection site, DataGardens WAVE™ automates the required processes for promoting standby infrastructure for production use. For example, when production and protection sites are configured in different subnets, DataGardens WAVE™ will automatically re-address migrant VMs and automatically redirect clients accordingly.

No Fail-Back

Most traditional DR systems cannot restore operations to the original production site after a disaster condition is resolved. Thus, manual restoration of the production site must be undertaken, which can cause greater disruption than the disaster itself.

As a next generation business continuity solution, DataGardens WAVE™ has been designed not only to support failover across sites, but fail-back operations as well. In fact, in many respects fail-back operations are less disruptive than the original failover as no data is lost and business processes continue uninterrupted.

High Network Costs

With many conventional DR systems, ordinary data volume management activities such as cloning and storage consolidation can result in massive data transfer across the WAN/network, severely impacting network performance.

The DataGardens WAVE™ has been designed to support low-bandwidth, high latency environments. Volume management activities such as snapshotting or cloning source volumes result in minimal data traffic across the network.

Management Challenges

As business processes evolve, their dependence on DR protected assets also evolve. With many DR systems, updating and testing the scripts to shut-down the protection site can present a never-ending challenge.

The DataGardens WAVE™ supports active resources across both production and protection sites, enabling greater utilization of IT assets. In addition, DataGardens WAVE™ can be used for a in many scenarios that extend beyond traditional disasters. For example, resources can be migrated to a protection site during data center upgrades or scheduled maintenance. There is no need to continually test DR systems as they can be used and verified everyday.

Failure Detection & Diagnosis

Typically, most of the downtime in the aftermath of a disaster relates to human decision processes. Many DR systems provide no assistance with detecting failure conditions, diagnosing their causes or ascertaining a preferred recovery plan.

DataGardens WAVE™ provides all of these services in the aftermath of a disaster: detecting failure conditions, determining their root cause, and establishing a preferred recovery plan.