Do you replicate your data remotely?
Companies are finally putting their money where their disaster recovery (DR) plans are. Today, 57% of Storage readers perform some sort of data replication to a remote location, and 51% of those who don't are planning to do it in the next two years. That's a marked increase over a similar survey in December 2004, when only 38% of respondents said they were doing remote replication.
By and large, Storage readers turn to their disk vendors for their replication needs, with 50% of respondents using array-based replication software like EMC's Symmetrix Remote Data Facility (SRDF) or Network Appliance's SnapMirror. And despite industry predictions that replication functionality will increasingly run in the network, 43% of would-be replicators say they're also evaluating array-based software.
When readers say remote, for the most part, they really mean it. Forty-nine percent of replication users copy data to sites more than 100km away, while only 18% do metro-area replication ( < 10km).
Finally, 60% of the time, data replicators are also doing high-availability clustering, ensuring not only that their data is available to within seconds of a failure, but that their applications are continuously available, too. As one reader put it, "geographically dispersed replication goes hand-in-hand with disaster recovery."
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| The questions below were posed only to respondents who said they weren't currently replicating data remotely. | ||
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| Are you planning on using long-distance replication? | |
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| What one approach to replication interests you most? | |
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This was first published in March 2006