Disaster Recovery & Business Continuity

Don’t let a disaster become disastrous for your business.

IT Managers:

• Which capabilities and performance parameters are most important to test before implementing a remote storage plan?

• How is the simplest and most cost-effective way to validate a disaster recovery solution?

• How do you emulate different network SLAs (in terms of error free seconds, % throughput and bit error rate) and determine if they are sufficient to meet your company's needs?

• How do you develop an ongoing maintenance plan to ensure that your remote storage operation continues to function effectively?

Disaster recovery & business continuity (DR/BC) planning are vital requirements for any business. Driven by mandates such as Sarbanes Oxley, DR/BC has become a critical agenda item for IT executives. As a result, DR/BC testing has risen in importance.

For many corporations, remote storage is a key ingredient in their disaster recovery and business continuity planning. In addition to the business need, in many industries, such as banking and health care, remote storage may soon be a regulatory requirement. For example, qualifying financial enterprises may have to maintain an alternative backup site 200-300 miles from the primary site, according to the Federal Reserve and SEC. Learn more about Regulatory Requirements.

Establishing a remote storage operation creates many challenges, particularly in the case of a synchronous remote storage solution. Depending on distance, transmission latency can have a significant impact on applications. Errors on the network can affect response times and data integrity. These issues, if not addressed, can result in lost data and lost business to a corporation. The bottom line: you must conduct remote storage and disaster recovery testing of your solution before deployment.

To meet this need of validating data recovery plans in a lab environment before going live, many corporations are using network emulators from Anue Systems.

For disaster recovery testing, Anue Network Emulators simulate real world delays and errors that occur as data is transmitted over long distances.

Delays and errors on a storage network due to distance, congestion and other factors create problems that need to be identified and addressed before any remote storage or disaster recovery solution is complete. There is no easier, more cost-effective way to simulate delays and impairments over Fibre Channel, IP and/or SONET networks than with Anue Network Emulators.

• Anue products are perfect for stress testing networks and network devices

  • Disaster recovery testing can be done using the Anue Emulator to delay a Fibre Channel, Gigabit Ethernet or SONET (OC3 to OC192) signal a user-specified amount of time without modifying the data. This simulates the latency that occurs over WANs, MANs and interconnected SANs much more accurately than using spools of fiber.

  • An Anue Network Emulator can progressively increase the injected bit error rate and error or eliminate specific packets to facilitate the testing of signal fail/degrade algorithms.

• Anue provides multi-protocol emulators

  • You can combine Anue's Fibre Channel, GigE or SONET loads on one system to cost-effectively test many types of connections (such as iSCSI/iFCP/FCiP).

• Anue allows software application layer testing

  • Testing the effects of latency and errors on critical software applications can be done using Anue Network Emulators regardless of the underlying WAN protocol. For example, you can tune your remote storage solutions to make sure critical transactions don't time out as a result of distance latency. This can be done without the complicated setup of an entire network of switches, optical fiber, protocol mappers, etc.

Case Study

• Remote Storage and Disaster Recovery
  Learn how Anue Network Emulators helped a large insurance company validate its remote storage solution.

White Paper

• Anue Emulator vs. Fiber Spools

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