When Recovery Means Life And Death
DATA RECOVERY MAY SEEM TRIVIAL, UNTIL DISASTER STRIKES
CIO Magazine - January / February 2002 Issue
"BUSINESS continuity" is a corporate buzz-word that is heard more and more these days. The concept itself has been around, that is, the putting in place of plans, policies and procedures that ensure the smooth recovery and flow of mission-critical functions, applications, infrastructure and data in the event of a total meltdown - be it an electrical catastrophe, fire, or a plane crashing into the building.
Studies have shown that over 40 percent of companies which experience an information-related breakdown never see business again. But it has taken the events of September 11, when terrorists flew hijacked commercial airliners into the World Trade Centre towers and the U.S. Pentagon, to bring home the need for business continuity. Many lives were lost in the incident, which also brought operations at companies and government agencies in the affected buildings to a standstill.
German banking giant, Commerzbank AG, was one such firm facing the total crippling of its operations, in particular, the backup of data which had, some months before, resided on tape. The bank had an office on the 33rd floor of Two World Financial Center.
An earlier decision to alter its data backup strategy probably saved the company its business that fateful day. Tape libraries made way for EMC's Symmetrix storage hardware and SRDF software which together allow companies to copy and route data in real time. Richard Arenaro, corporate and regional manager of Windows and Unix systems at the bank, told the publication, Infoweek, that relying on tape alone would mean having to store and then physically move the media in the event of a crisis.
The multi-million dollar EMC solution may have been expensive, but it allowed the bank to backup data in just four hours, compared to the 20 it would have taken using tape libraries. Twenty hours of downtime, in the bank's business turnover, roughly equates to the US$30 billion in financial and money transfer it processes each day. Arrenro explained that the time saved also meant more time spent ensuring that employees are safe.
Commerzbank was one of the vendor's 25 customers with operations in the building. EMC also helped by offering full data backup facilities.
Across the Pacific, Citibank in Singapore discovered that it would take at least 24 hours of downtime to recover from a disaster at its Corporate Bank, costing the company as much as $24 million.
The bank then turned to EMC's SRDF software, which enables fast, non-disruptive data consolidation between sites, and supports mirroring of data centres, ensuring that business continues in a planned, or unplanned, outage.
With the help of EMC's Professional Services, SRDF and TimeFinder were integrated with the Corporate Bank's data centre, enabling data to be mirrored to the contingency site, ready for deployment should the main system go down. Citibank also authorized a similar solution for its midrange open systems environment, and its retail banking operation also explored the use of SRDF for business continuance.
EMC also helped the bank relocate data to a new data centre in just 12 hours, and the bank now operates out of the new one, with only two hardware centres controlled by a separate command facility.
Ramon Karingal, vice president at the bank's Asia Pacific Processing Centre, believes the relocation could not have been enacted so swiftly with SRDF, and the help of EMC Professional Services.
He says: "We relied heavily on EMC's Professional Services because they had the much-needed capability and commitment we required.
|
Copyright
2005 All rights reserved.