SSD and Business Continuity (Part 1) ? Vision Solutions Inc.

by Ian Masters, Sales Director Northern Europe, Vision Solutions

This is the first instalment of a two-part series on the impact of Solid State Disk (SSD) on business continuity. Ian Masters, Vision?s Sales Director of Northern Europe explores the significance of SSD and how it plays into the need for heightened levels of continuity.

Solid state disk (SSD) has the potential to be a game changer to the world of enterprise storage. The main advantage of SSD-based storage is that it offers faster performance and reduced latency, as well as lower heat output compared to traditional disk. Organizations needing the highest levels of speed and execution are turning to SSD for exactly these benefits, but the top tier applications they store on SSD are usually the ones in greatest need of protection against disaster as well.

This makes solid business continuity planning essential. If you are not careful in your approach, integrating SSD into your storage can affect existing disaster recovery plans.

Continuity options

Companies traditionally tackle business continuity through duplication, i.e. protecting IT assets and applications by maintaining a mirrored copy of all data. At the base level, enterprise storage is typically deployed with one block of storage at the primary site to support the production data and applications, and then a second block at the replication site. This site can be a second company location, or alternatively, a remote server hosted by a service provider. Activity on the primary storage is replicated over to the secondary location in order to provide a comprehensive backup.

While effective, this approach can be expensive, as you have to buy double the amount of identical hardware and potentially double the volume of software licenses. If an investment has been made in a certain brand of storage for the production site, then the same brand and model can be required at the secondary site as well.

This approach is normally linked to synchronous replication, where an action at the primary site is reproduced at the secondary site immediately. This limits the distance that can exist between the two sites while keeping the data sets synchronized, as light can only travel at a certain speed over the network. For linking locations that are further away geographically, or where network speeds are not high, an asynchronous approach is suitable. This ensures that data is kept in the same order, but it does not have to be done at the same time on both sites.

In the next installment of this blog post, Ian Masters explores in detail several important points for companies to consider when introducing SSD arrays into their networks.

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