Hospital uses adaptive WAN, synchronous backup for efficient, reliable recovery
Here is an example of a hospital implementing a robust disaster recovery system relying on WAN-based synchronous back-up which is at the same time HIPAA compliant
Albert Oriol, is program office director and data security officer at the Children’s Hospital in Denver, observes that “Most organizations have their fail-over boxes sitting next to their main systems in the data center, and then they have to buy a third set of boxes for their disaster recovery site,” Oriol says. “We are able to put our fail-over boxes in the disaster recovery site and eliminate the need for that third set of boxes entirely.””
Children’s has split its storage clusters, with half at the disaster recovery site and the rest at the main data center downtown. The key to making this work is a very fast, responsive network connection using Linthicum, Maryland-based Ciena’s Adaptive WAN products running over a private 2 Gbps fiber physical layer. It uses Hopkinton, Massachusetts-based EMC’s Symmetrix Remote Data Facility and MirrorView to support synchronous backup of all data to the disaster site. The result: “Our tests show that it takes less than five minutes to fail-over, validate and move on,” Oriol says.
