IT Justice League, assemble! Part 1 of 2

[Crash_-_Data_Ce]

Greetings, earthlings. I’ve been enjoying some much-needed R&R off the grid for the first time since beginning our U.S. tour last October.

A thrilling trip to Las Vegas in December left my circuits fried, but our most recent jaunt to the 3^rd Annual Red Hat Partner Conference North America was enough to put me into a post-failover coma. While in San Diego Jan. 14 through 16, our team marveled conference attendees with the fruits of our Silver Sponsor collaboration with Red Hat.

Meet the super friends

Director of Product Management Tom Harwood delivered a keynote session on the first day, explaining how employing the Red Hat Enterprise Linux data center basically enables you to create your own virtual Justice League.

Stick with me on this one: Let’s say that your business is Batman, Symantec is Flash, Oracle is Green Lantern, Veritas Cluster Server is Wonder Woman and Gartner is Aquaman. That makes Red Hat the Martian Manhunter. Each one is forceful on its own … but together? Simply invincible.

Having had such a stellar experience collaborating with Red Hat Enterprise Linux data centers, my nodes were tingling with glee as our team awakened attendees to a universe of possibilities. Perhaps the biggest draw is Veritas Cluster Server’s enterprise-grade application protection in the form of wide-area disaster recovery.

Just how wide can a disaster recovery area be?

In my video, you watched as data failed over to the data center on the roof. But what about a distance of 238,900 miles, an attendee wondered. Can we really failover to the moon? Absolutely!

Veritas Replicator provides asynchronous software data replication, or integration with hardware replication solutions, for failover across 100 kilometers or more. Your data isn’t disappearing on our watch!

We know this because Symantec and Red Hat’s aligned engineering teams have conducted rigorous mutual testing of joint solutions. Businesses have access to our aligned support departments via TSANet, as well as shared reference architectures, white paper and best practices.

Recovery recon and simple scripts

Natural disasters, like alien attacks, are rarely something that a business can plan for. You don't invest in a product with the expectation that it’ll eventually stop working – you take precautions to ensure that you’re prepared for when that day comes. You wouldn't take the Batmobile on a high-speed chase without having Lucius Fox routinely check to ensure that the oil in the engine was fresh. That’s where disaster recovery testing comes in. You need it, plain and simple.

Further, Veritas Cluster Server deploys DR with fast, efficient and out-of-the-box agents for apps, DBs and replication. This is good for your business for several reasons, including the obvious avoidance of potential human error with manual scripting. You know what happens when you send a human to do a datacenter’s job? Someone gets thrown off the roof, that’s what.

But I digress. With reduced reliance on personnel during such incidents, and reduced system resource utilization, your dollars and data resources are freed up for other processing. In single instance Oracle databases, recovery takes less than a minute.

Alas, I must recharge before our next mission to Orlando, but this story isn’t over yet.

Check back next week to hear about how Dynamic Multi-Pathing can maximize your data center investment, like it did for a major U.S. government agency.