Business need

Remote data replication for Business Continuity/Disaster Recovery (BC/DR) is a key initiative among companies to meet business availability and growing regulatory demands. Corporations know that implementing BC/DR solutions is essential; yet very challenging to extend applications between data centers cost effectively while still maintaining the performance needed for business critical applications.

Challenges

The challenge of replicating data between data centers is often the cost of the bandwidth service, which traditionally makes up to 60 percent of the cost for the solution. Current storage extension solutions require the storage equipment to connect into a Storage Area Network (SAN) switch, a storage extension device, Ethernet/ATM switches, an external router, and finally to the service provider's Wide Area Network (WAN) equipment. These multiple devices add initial capital costs, but more importantly add significant complexity and ongoing management expenses. The network now requires continual engineering of the network to maintain the performance and results in increased downtimes due to the challenge and complexity of isolating failures and configuration problems.

Solution

This problem requires a storage extension solution that optimizes the bandwidth and eliminates the requirement for external switches/routers while reducing latency within the network. This could significantly reduce the network cost of a BC/DR solution and make it affordable for the ever-increasing number of applications deemed critical enough to replicate.

Ciena's offerings

Ciena offers multiple best-in-class storage extension solutions for both WDM deployments over dark fiber and Metro and WAN deployments over service provider SONET/SDH/Gigabit Ethernet services. Ciena's network storage solutions reduce the bandwidth required by up to 70 percent through per port hardware data compression, efficient mapping and dynamic bandwidth assignment. These capabilities allow multiple data center services—such as Fibre Channel, ESCON®, FICON® and Gigabit Ethernet—to be aggregated together over the same link, but still maintain low latency, application isolation and security. Ciena's storage extension products provide the optimal solution, whether moving 1 TB across town or 50 TB across the country.

Benefits

• Enable enterprises to implement the right BC/DR plan without being hindered by cost
• Eliminate the high-cost barrier normally associated with high-quality storage connectivity
• Reduce re-occurring bandwidth costs by up to 70%
• Lower capital cost (elimination of switches/routers, software-tunable equipment)
• Higher performance (low latency, high throughput, detailed monitoring