Storage Expo: Storage playing key role in business continuity

A number of businesses are increasingly finding that storage technology can be a key enabler to meeting business continuity expectations.

Delegates gathered at the Storage Expo event in London today to find out how storage technology had benefited the business continuity strategies of a diverse set of end users, each with their own IT infrastructure issues that have looked to use different storage-related solutions.

Ian Hood, head of IT for the Wildfowl and Wetland Trust (WWF) said a number of rural offices were brought onto a centralised storage infrastructure using Riverbed's Steelhead network accelerator.

By focusing on the broadband networks used to link its distributed IT infrastructure and provide site-based access to centrally held files and systems, Wood said the WWF, which had no business continuity plans prior to the installation of the network accelerator, could now use its network capability to ensure data consistency and disaster recovery.

"Disaster recovery is the IT bit of our business continuity strategy," said Hood. "Now we have that, we need input and leadership buy-in to complete our work."

Sunlight Services Group technical project and support manager, Najeeb Ahmed said a major IT overhaul, moving from a distributed client-server model across its 60-plus sites where each had its own server, to a more centralised one gave the company the chance to update its business continuity provision.

"The number of customers and IT users we serve has doubled in the last ten years, through business growth and acquisition," Ahmed said. But the resulting integration issues led to the replacement of the dry cleaning and laundry company's core line-of-business applications.

"This allowed me to change my focus from disaster recovery, to designing business continuity into the infrastructure from the start," he said.

Sunlight has since deployed a 3Par InServ storage server to provide direct connectivity to host sites without the need for storage area network (SAN) switching equipment or capability and replicate data from the core SAN offsite.

Having improved IT's ability to keep the business running, Ahmed said: "Were now able to say to business we can recover all applications within a set period of time or provision the recovery of the most important according to agreed service levels."

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