simpleSAN Data Availability!  Defined as the period of time it takes for you to regain access to your data, be it a restore from tape or a seamless hardware fail-over with little or no downtime. Simply put, if you lose access to your data, you can't bill, invoice, design, check email, etc ...those activities that require constant availability to your revenue generating applications. And if you lose you data all together, you could very well go out of business. Your financial/billing information, customer information, CRM or ERP systems, if you have them, drive your business and your profits. Your data is your lifeblood to your company. And lost access to your data means lost money, Big money!

The importance of protecting your data can not be stressed enough or overstated. A firm, confirmed and tested data availability plan is a must for business continuance in case of a hardware failure, or worst, a disaster.

Consider the follow as to pertains to your data availability requirements:

1. Rank, starting with the most important to the least important, your top, mission critical applications that run your business. It could be your email server or a database that holds your customer contact information or a web server/ portal that provides data to your customers or your billing system or just word documents that reside on your desktop/laptop.

2. Take those ranked mission critical applications and ask yourself, how long can I stand to be without access to the data? How would my customers be effected by an outage? How long can my customers / clients / end-users do without the data? How long before I send my employees home because of a data outage? How would it affect my business if I lost the data all together? How long before my boss starts breathing down my neck and threatening to fire me?

3. Quantify the costs of downtime by asking questions like: How much will it cost me an hour for the non-productivity because my clients / customers / end-users / employees do not have assess to the data? How much will it cost me every time I can not send invoices and billings? What is the cost of the inability to send correspondence or quotes because the email system is down? How many man hours will it take to rebuild/re-key this information? Does my company have board members and shareholders to answer to? How are they be effected when the data is not available? In this "just one-click-away-from-lossing-a-customer" world we live in, 24 hours a day, 7 days a week, 365 days a year is the required data availabilty mode of operation.

4. Take these answers to build your data availability plan for each mission critcal application that drives your business. This is where simpleSAN's expertise comes in. We qualify and quantify these issues, match them with the best technology fit and assist you in designing a data availability plan that is entirely based on your requirements. We provide data availability solutions of any level down to as short as only less than 1 second of downtime.

simpleSAN will design a solution that matches your availability requirements to the applications that drives your business. And as your needs grow and/or change, you will never outgrow the flexibility and scaleability of iSCSI. All the while, ensuring that access to your data never suffers. With iSCSI, data availability methods can be implemented at any level with ease. It's all just a matter of your paranoia level.

Some data availability level samples, ranked in paranoia (1 being the most paranoid), would be

(6) Tape backup - Your data is protected on a piece of media that you can carry off-site or store in a fireproof safe. The data is there. However, the recovery time is the speed of the tape drive and data rebuild. In other words, slow.

(5) Off-site Tape backup - Again, your data is protected. Plus we step up the paranoia level by delivering the data directly off-site. Restore is painfully slow if you perform the restore "over the wire". If a total restore is necessary, you could have a "like" tape drive on-hand on-site to perform a restore locally.

(4) Disk-to-Disk backup - Rather than sending your backup jobs to a tape drive, you can use low-cost IDE/ATA drives to protect your data. With this method, you can have near hard drive speed backups (for that ever shrinking "backup window") and far quicker restores. You can also back that backed up data off the hard drives to tape for extra data protection (and "versioning"). This method is sometimes called "serverless backup".

(3) Off-site Disk-to-disk backup - Here, your data is protected off-site. This method is faster than a off-site tape solution. However, "over the wire restores" could be slow. Fine for one directory / file restores. But, still, much quicker than restoring from tape.

(2) Off-site data replication - Replicate every write your systems performs to a remote server at a remote, off-site location. When a failure occurs locally, you can direct your end users / customers / clients to access the data from the remote site, real time. When you repair the failure, you can re-sync your data back on the original server. Keep in mind that this method is real-time; Viruses, corruptions, deletions, etc will be replicated.

(1) RAID - Use heterogeneous iSCSI Arrays to stripe and/or mirror your data across a multitude of them. This way, because you have both data and hardware redundancy, if there was a failure, your servers would seamlessly fail over and access the data off the remaining devices. With iSCSI, you can setup any level ,and any combination of levels, of RAID: 1, 3 or 5. Building an unified data storage environment with iSCSI, you have virtually no limitations on scaleability, availablity or the management within.

Yet another level of paranoia is server clustering. Where by if an application server were to go down, it would seamlessly fail over to another server (dedicated or non-dedicated). SANs make this configuration very cost effective. In the event of a failure, the logical volumes of storage, which contains the data to the application, would fail over to the 2nd server as well. Therefore, it is not necessary to have twice the physical hard drive space.

Understand that these are single point solutions. Most cases require a combination of these solutions. I.e...You should be sure to backup your data in case of data corruption or a virus attack, so you can restore from last good known copy of the data. And you should "RAID" your data so when there is a hardware failure, you will not experience downtime but a seamless fail over.

For a true data availability / disaster recovery plan, a combination of these solutions should be put in place protecting those particular applications that are identified as mission critical. simpleSAN's experienced staff has the expertise and knowledge to help you implement the DA/DR plan that is right for your applications and end-users/customers/clients.

iSCSI, all the availability, scaleability and manageability benefits of fibre channel SANs at a fraction of the cost and without the intense learning curve.