You also want an ePaper? Increase the reach of your titles
YUMPU automatically turns print PDFs into web optimized ePapers that Google loves.
time improving their recovery capabilities. The main<br />
production center had a variety of heterogeneous<br />
servers and storage, and IBFX was looking for a<br />
solution that would provide the flexibility to<br />
ac<strong>com</strong>modate all of them. Of particular concern were<br />
minimizing data loss on recovery, shortening recovery<br />
times, and solution scalability.<br />
“We needed technology that would enable us to fully<br />
recover our data center in the event of a catastrophe,<br />
without any gaps,” said Paxton Powers, IT<br />
Infrastructure Manager, IBFX. “Our idea was for a<br />
<strong>com</strong>pletely virtual DR site. Real-time replication from<br />
physical to virtual machines would be the fastest way<br />
to transfer data from the Salt Lake City data center to<br />
the New York DR site.”<br />
After evaluating their requirements, IBFX came to the<br />
conclusion that tape-based infrastructure could not<br />
meet their highest recovery tier requirements, and that<br />
the business impacts of excessive downtime justified<br />
an investment in newer technology. Candidate<br />
technologies to meet IBFX’s recovery requirements<br />
included CDP, asynchronous replication, recovery<br />
automation, and disk-based recovery.<br />
InMage Systems provided a software-based recovery<br />
solution that integrated local (backup) and remote<br />
(DR) recovery capabilities into a single solution<br />
designed to support heterogeneous environments.<br />
InMage’s foundation technologies, which included<br />
CDP, asynchronous replication, application<br />
failover/failback, WAN optimization, and disk-based<br />
IBFX headquarters<br />
Taking steps to prepare for Disaster Recovery<br />
Paxton Powers<br />
“We needed technology that would enable us to<br />
fully recover our data center in the event of a<br />
catastrophe, without any gaps,”<br />
recovery, were a good fit for IBFX’s needs. CDP<br />
helped minimize the impact of data protection<br />
operations on trading servers, helping them to<br />
maintain high performance, and provided options to<br />
minimize data loss on recovery while meeting very<br />
short RTOs. Asynchronous replication, <strong>com</strong>bined<br />
with WAN optimization, allowed IBFX to maintain<br />
very current copies of their production data sets at<br />
their remote data center in New York while keeping<br />
bandwidth costs to a minimum. Application failover<br />
and failback extended the solution’s abilities beyond<br />
just recovering data, helping IBFX to automate<br />
application-level recovery operations to make them<br />
faster and more reliable.<br />
“Our main objective was to be able to recover our<br />
data center and remain operational during downtime<br />
events,” said Powers. “InMage gave us that ability.<br />
We’ve got our production trade servers being<br />
replicated between our two data centers, which is a<br />
huge win. Additionally, we can meet near-zero<br />
recovery time objectives, enabling us to <strong>com</strong>e back<br />
online very quickly after a problem. In the trading<br />
business, time literally is money and every minute of<br />
downtime counts. We have peace of mind now that<br />
we’ve minimized the risk of impacting customers or<br />
revenue due to server downtime, whether it’s a simple<br />
failure or a natural disaster.”<br />
january 2010 e-FOREX | 115
Change language