By Kushal Patel, Senior Consultant & Network Practice Lead
We see replication challenges within many of our clients’ environments. When RPOs are not met, the worry (and sometimes near panic) set in. While buying more bandwidth may seem like the only logical solution, it’s not cheap. So before we make that recommendation, we evaluate the situation to see if WAN optimization may be a better way to go.
That was the case at a leading investment firm we work with. They had a top down requirement to build a DR strategy in which all production data would be replicated with an RPO of 30 seconds to a secondary datacenter. However, over the existing network infrastructure, replication would fall behind and fail to meet the RPO 10-12% of the time, or up to 4 days per month. Given the sensitivity and mission-critical nature of their financial data, they could not tolerate this level of risk and potential non-compliance penalties. So they called Daymark.
After Daymark evaluated the environment, we determined that the client’s replication volumes were exhausting their existing bandwidth. However, the 5x increase in bandwidth they required was quite cost prohibitive. That’s when we recommended Riverbed WAN optimization. Without the need for any increase in bandwidth, Riverbed’s Steelhead appliance was able to ensure 100% successful replication, eliminate the effects of latency on long distance replication, reduce non-compliance risks, and ensure data availability in the event of a disaster.
This WAN optimization project required coordination among the investment firm’s market leading network, storage and server vendors. Daymark solved the investment firm’s replication problems and developed a strategy that would scale to meet their growth for the next three years. Using our breadth of datacenter technology knowledge we quarterbacked the entire integration process within their multi-vendor environment, managing to work through complex vendor interoperability problems and eliminate “finger pointing” to come to a resolution quickly.
So, before you upgrade bandwidth as a knee-jerk response, let us see if there is a more efficient, cost-effective way to solve your replication problems.
