2 June 2003 Dublin/Boston--CNT, the global specialist in information movement, has demonstrated that transatlantic data replication of mainframe and open systems applications is a cost-effective way to meet business continuity objectives of companies with data centres in the UK and the USA.
Utilising Hibernia Atlantic's recently opened 12,200km undersea fibre-optic network linking the UK to Boston and New York, CNT and EMC demonstrated the fail-over of a Microsoft Exchange e-Mail application with 2,000 users, running on EMC Symmetrix DMX series storage systems and Dell servers located in Dublin.
EMC SRDF (Symmetrix Remote Data Facility) software was used to mirror the Dublin data to the back-up systems in Boston while the CNT UltraNet Edge managed the Fibre Channel (FC) to SDH (622Mbit/s) protocol conversion, compression and data integrity.
When the Dublin system was taken down, simulating a "catastrophic" outage, users could access their email data from the Boston system just as though it was local. The Exchange database was then recovered back to the Dublin system, all without any disruption of service to end-users.
"The need to guarantee continuity of operations on a global basis in the face of new and potentially large-scale threats is now of highest concern to Board Members and Shareholders", said Mark Vargo, Senior Vice President, Europe, CNT.
"This demonstration, conducted in front of customer audiences in both Dublin and Boston, showed how CNT and its partners are making it possible for companies to protect critical business information, by distributing it between multiple data centres in the UK and US.
"In the past, circuit costs of up to £100,000 per month have forced companies to severely restrict application usage and compromise bandwidth", continued Vargo.
"Integrating the Hibernia Atlantic service into our information movement solutions means that customers can reduce costs by up to 80% compared to traditional trans-Atlantic circuit costs, opening up new opportunities for international companies to improve data availability and business efficiency".
Garry Veale, Vice President of Partner Sales and Productivity, EMC EMEA, said, "This technology demonstration showcases the most cost-effective means of replicating, protecting and distributing data over extremely long distances while illustrating the latest in network technology advancements."