Accelerating Transfer of Data and Handling Disaster Recovery for BFSI
By Bill Ting, Market Evangelist, Riverbed, 02-Feb-2015
Disaster recovery objectives are required to be in fraction of seconds, especially for banks and financial institutions.
RiverbedMarket EvangelistWAN acceleration has successfully enabled and facilitated network-based backup approaches in the most demanding customer environments.
Business continuity, at its most simplistic level, is the ability to maintain services in the event of a disruption or disaster whether it is caused by network access, server outage, or applications crash. Recovery objectives are required to be in fraction of seconds, especially for banks and financial institutions. Today most organizations are moving away from tape backup, and instead are using network-based backup over the WANs (MPLS/Internet VPN) to transport the data back to their datacenters.
They also need to build secondary backup centers or exploring public cloud storage offerings as a simple, cost-effective alternative to protecting their valuable asset - DATA. Network-based approaches to data backup are often limited by WAN bandwidth constraints (and high network latency. Without significant costly WAN bandwidth upgrades, this can make remote long-distance backup or replication impossible for many remote offices with significant data stores as well as between large datacenters.
WAN Optimization accelerates the transfer of data over the WAN for backup and replication purposes. Through revolutionary technology, it delivers capabilities which enables centralized, disk-to-disk backup process that simplifies backup and datacenter replication, effectively increasing WAN capacity by detecting and eliminating the transfer of repetitive data patterns over the WAN and reducing data replication bandwidth requirements up to 90%. Customers can realize a 3-year ROI of 457% and payback in less than 7 months (IDC).
With greater cost savings and staff productivity, the profit increases and cost reduces significantly. By overcoming bandwidth limitations and optimizing transfers to overcome network latency, WAN acceleration has successfully enabled and facilitated network-based backup approaches in the most demanding customer environments. One of the customers in BFSI – the Capital City Bank was facing challenge in replicating data from its main datacenter to a disaster recovery (DR) site in a different state. The bank designed the out-of-state DR site to meet its business continuity requirements. Following build-out of the new DR site, the IT team replicated Metavante check image files and some Jack Henry application files using a 50 Mbps WAN link to the DR facility. Backup windows often exceeded 60 hours.
The slow performance was caused by high network latency while replicating seven terabytes of data. The CCBG IT team needed to improve its RPO, while avoiding costly bandwidth upgrades. After deploying Application Performance Management solution, Capital City Bank was able to reduce replication time from 48-72 hours down to 4-6 hours and avoided costly bandwidth upgrades. In addition they have been successful in centralizing and virtualizing 80% of servers. Financial institutions around the globe turn to vendors for help, to make them better understand their networks and application performance, to optimize and dramatically accelerate applications, enable server and datacenter consolidation projects and to facilitate fast, secure access to centralized storage.
