The cost of downtime for an organization can be staggering, ranging from a thousand dollars to hundreds of thousands of dollars per hour. In today’s competitive business environment, availability of data is critical to the survival of any company.

 

The following is a partial list of causes of disruption of services and/or lack of data access:

 

¨      Hard disk failure	¨      Power failure
¨      System OS software failure	¨      Application Failure
¨      Configuration changes	¨      Network failure
¨      Storage media failure	¨      Accidental deletion of files / data
¨      Destructive viruses	¨      Natural disasters (fire, flood, earthquake, etc.)
¨      Theft of hardware ¨      Human Errors	¨      Acts of sabotage

 

Business Continuity Service is defined as fulfilling the need for secure backup of computer data with fast recovery – either at the site where data is processed and stored or at a site that is remote from the primary site.  GAS, in partnership with FalconStor, offers a software and professional service solution where data can be protected either at the client’s facility or at a remote storage facility.  The primary benefit of this solution is that it does not, by definition require the purchase of vendor specific disc drives.

 

Information Technology Business Continuity Needs

 

High Availability

 

Typically, High Availability solutions have only been available for larger companies that can afford dual servers and fault tolerant disk subsystems with automatic failover, which often doubles their IT investment.  Organizations have spent hundreds of thousands, if not millions, of dollars to install High Availability solutions.  The mid-tier marketplace, which typically have fifty to a few hundred users running on a single server, generally does not have this option available to them.  They need a more cost effective solution; that’s why GAS, in partnership with FalconSTOR, is offering data protection as part of a business continuity plan.

 

Disaster Recovery

 

Once a plan is developed to recover from a disaster, a site is required to have critical servers, storage and user connections available.  However, if a disaster wipes out your computer room, what happens to your current data?  Organizations spend a lot of time and effort to back up and manage their data to insure its availability in case of a disaster, yet, despite these efforts, the typical organization can only guess as to whether or not their backups are actually protecting critical data and are fully recoverable.  A major challenge to IT managers is determining if their backups are valid and restorable.  If data is not backed up successfully, it cannot be recovered or prolongs data recovery costing both time and money.  GAS’s offerings assure data integrity and fast recovery.

 

Data Assurance

 

Data Assurance is the ability to guarantee the viability and availability of data, where and when an organization needs it.  To insure data availability, organizations invest in redundant hardware or commit expensive resources to solve the problem.  But, the integrity of the data is still not assured.  Data loss and corruption can occur, due to human, program or hardware error as well as natural disasters. 

 

The most common form of data protection is to perform scheduled backups, most often on a daily basis.  Data lost between scheduled backups is unprotected.  Also, because of the growing amount of data and the performance hit on the application server, backup times are confined to “off-hours.”  As data grows, the backup window gets smaller and smaller. More importantly, most organizations do not have a plan or the resources for validating the data backup.  A bad or corrupt backup is as bad as no backup at all. Businesses require a cost-effective solution that assures quick data recovery and maximum availability.  Using the latest available technology, GAS achieves the highest level of data integrity and availability, can offer real-time server-less backup and can be complementary to traditional scheduled backup procedures.

 

The GAS – Falconstor Business Continuity Solution

 

GAS, in partnership with FalconSTOR, is offering a service that provides end-to-end automatic data protection at the storage level.  We offer end-to-end redundancy with an option for no single point of failures, including data protection from OS, database and hardware failure while insuring data integrity.  We can also provide for data capacity expansion without downtime to reconfigure your data subsystems.

 

Most organizations recognize that their data can be a key competitive differentiator and that employees and customers must have rapid continuous access to data.  Simply put, data loss equals lost revenue and unhappy customers.  Our solution provides a cost-effective high availability solution that leverages current infrastructure and does not require expensive proprietary equipment.

 

Data recovery is just a matter of sending or transmitting a replicated copy of the organization’s data to a site of their choosing when and where they want it, with data validation at both locations.

 

In summary, the GAS - FalconStor solution is a low cost software based solution that allows the IT department to manage disc storage in the users’ existing storage environment. It does not, by definition, require the purchase of proprietary storage equipment since it can be deployed in any of the popular disc vendor’s equipment. The typical requires purchase of the FalconStor software package and related professional services for both installation and training.