An effective disaster recovery strategy requires all data to be stored redundantly at multiple physical locations. In the event of a disaster that destroys data stored at one location, there will always be a second, redundant copy of the lost data at a different physical location. Such a strategy ensures that a single cataclysmic event, such as hurricane, flood, or terrorist act, will never destroy your corporation's data.

Business resiliency requires an even higher standard for data replication: information must be copied to multiple locations on a very frequent basis, allowing services to be shifted from one data center to another in the event of a catastrophe.

Implementation of either solution requires a data replication solution capable of transporting large amounts of data over the long distances required for geographical diversity in the data storage sites. Riverbed speeds data replication solutions to transfer significant amounts of data over the WAN to the disaster recovery site. Riverbed supports software server-based data replication solutions as well as those using Fibre Channel SANs with FCIP or iFCP.

Customers who deploy Riverbed Steelhead appliances to accelerate their data replication see the following benefits:

• Reduced backup windows. Previously excessive backup windows can now be significantly reduced, in many cases by an order of 10x or more. This provides far greater flexibility in the scheduling and frequency of replication tasks, leading to increased protection of your company's mission-critical data.
• Leverage of byte-level redundancies. Many data replication products include differencing mechanisms that facilitate transfer of only changed files, disk sectors, or data blocks. Such mechanisms make sense, but they only recognize data differences within individual files or data blocks. Data commonalities that exist among different files would not be recognized by such differencing mechanisms, and even small changes of a few bytes within a typical 56KB data block would result in retransmission of the entire data block. On the other hand, Riverbed recognizes byte-level data redundancies at granularities of as small as just a few bytes. As a result, Riverbed provides significant additional data reduction far beyond that provided by most data replication products. Additionally, files that have moved over the network before, via any application such as email, file sharing, etc., will be recognized and not transferred again.
• Utilization of existing WAN links. The sheer volume of a corporation's database would normally necessitate an expensive network upgrade to supply the requisite bandwidth for the replication operation. However, Riverbed's data reduction algorithm is so effective that in many cases, a customer's existing network can be used for the replication operation. Riverbed can thus allow a customer to avoid prohibitively-expensive recurring costs associated with high-speed WAN links.
• Maximized utilization of high-speed WAN links. Corporations that have already deployed high-speed WAN links may notice that their data replication products are not effective in utilizing the available bandwidth in these expensive WANs. The impact of latency over long distances can case significant performance degradation for TCP transport implementations that lack adequate buffering. Riverbed's high-speed TCP capabilities can address these issues, and provide a significant performance boost for such applications and data replication facilities that lack proper buffering. In many cases Riverbed is able to boost performance up to hundreds of megabits per second.
• Vendor/technology-neutral solution. Riverbed technology is effective for optimizing any TCP-compliant replication solution - including products from Veritas, EMC/Legato, Network Appliance, IBM/Tivoli. Riverbed also accelerates IP traffic from most FCIP/iFCP products for SAN-based data. It doesn't matter whether the replication is file-based or block-based - Riverbed delivers performance enhancement for any TCP-based data replication mechanism.

Riverbed solutions optimize and accelerate all types of TCP traffic, regardless of the specific backup application or type of data being protected. Whether you are considering ways to optimize your current backup and data replication strategy, or looking for a more effective strategy, Riverbed Steelhead products are a critical tool for simplifying, consolidating, and accelerating WAN-based backup.

Download the Network-Based Backup and Data Replication Solution Brief and the Network Appliance ReplicatorX Performance Brief to learn more.