Sep 29th, 2009 |
So Hawaii just went through a tense couple of hours as we waited on the data to come in off the mid pacific buoys in regards to a possible tsunami from the 8.3 earthquake in Samoa. What this really started me thinking about was business continuity and just how would my school, my lab or my home recover from a natural disaster? Well no tsunami, but lots of folks were thinking about “what if”.
The fires in Southern California reminded me about the amazing demonstration I saw by IoSafe Corporation as they baked an external hard drive. The IoSafe Solo is an external USB hard drive that can survive a fire and then a drowning by the firehoses. This video really does a good job of illustrating just what it can survive, but most importantly, you didn’t have to run back into a burning building to save your corporate data.
However, what about a slightly bigger dataset and all those servers that you have running. I previously described how Interop uses the Coyote Point gear to globally load balance our server images, but did I mention that one of our other sponsors is Global Data Vault and it’s with these folks that Interop has a level of safety previously unheard of. The concept is that we installed some software onto our virtual machines that allowed us to synchronize the VM images across our WAN connection. So even when the NOC is packed up and heading across country in trucks, we still have access to our servers for the show. Pretty slick and while we use it for between show data mining, the real intent is to provide a hot/warm failover system. If you’re running a global load balancer, then it can happen automatically. if not, just change your DNS entry and you’re live.
Global Data Vault provides superior solutions for backup and disaster recovery. Our head office is in Dallas, and we serve customers from data centers in the US, Canada, and the UK. Our Failover solution is designed to bring big company DR capabilities to Small Medium Business (SMB) and Small Medium Enterprise (SME), at a fraction of the cost. Contact us at www.globaldatavault.com or 214-363-1900.
