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Compellent this week will announce the availability of its new Remote Instant Replay and Data Progression tools, which are designed to help midmarket customers avoid costly remote replication disruptions and improve disaster recovery reliability.
Remote Instant Replay allows organizations to track customizable point-in-time snapshot intervals, which can be tested at any point for verification, said officials of the Eden Prairie, Minn., company.
The new IP-based replication offering is an add-on application to Compellents modular SAN (storage area network)-based Storage Center hardware and software architecture.
Remote Instant Replay supports data transfer to multiple off-site locations by connecting to a companys router through an iSCSI card within Storage Centers controller.
The replication tool does not require identical SAN configurations, protocol interface or disk technology at each off-site location and features centralized management capabilities.
Compellents Data Progression add-on module to Storage Center is designed to help customers use a tiered storage environment.
The new tool provides volume allocation and uses automation to migrate inactive or seldom-used data to lower-cost storage options based on usage patterns or access frequency.
Barry Doerscher, IT director for Salt Lake City-based United Subcontractors Inc., said Compellents Remote Instant Replay technology has proven itself to be a simplified and cost-effective fit.
“When I first got here, it took seven days to get the disaster recovery site up and running, so obviously there were some holes there,” said Doerscher. “The [Compellent] cost was considerably less than the other vendors we looked at, and there was little to no extra hardware we had to put in place. I dont think that was the case with the other guys.”
To save time and boost performance, Doerscher said he does not perform any backups on his primary SAN but instead does asynchronous Remote Instant Replay on United Subcontractors secondary SAN environment 12 miles away.
“[Previously] you almost had to have a person to administer backup and recoveries; now its all automated and done on its own,” Doerscher said. “Before it took us about 4 hours based on file or type. With this environment, its literally minutes, and we have it back.”