Phase 2 adds to the replication strategy a cost of $39,000, plus $795 per managed server. This amounts to $48,540 for servers in the HQ data center and DR facility, plus $126,405 to instrument all store servers into the managed pool, for a total cost of $174,945. Not included is the cost of storage and server hardware at the DR site.
Phase 3 is when the infrastructure forklift occurs and a SAN is implemented. As with the other bids, most of this infrastructure-upgrade cost is undocumented. Softek's software components total $50,000 for two Storage Provisioner "engines," and $19,500 for EnView. SANView pricing was not provided--about the only deficit in the bid.
Fujitsu Softek, (877) 887-4562, (408) 746-7638. www.softek.com
Veritas Software, which was identified in our e-poll as the perceived leader in data-protection technology, with 70 percent of 549 votes, seemed a likely contender. In fact, we thought the company's longstanding offering for Oracle database replication, combined with the broad, platform- and OS-agnostic breadth of its solution, would make it a shoo-in for Editor's Choice. However, we found the Veritas proposal sparse and, in some ways, nonresponsive to the needs of Darwin's; we suspect that this is the result of a bit of "laurel resting" by the authors.
Veritas proposed its Volume Manager, FlashSnap and Volume Replicator product trio to segregate, capture point-in-time copies and forward data across an IP interconnect to the remote facility Darwin's uses. In the next breath, it added the recommendation that Cluster Server and Global Cluster Manager be considered to enable the failover of applications to the remote site.
On the plus side, this proposed solution boasts less than one minute of data delta in the 80-mile, cross-site replication scenario. Other strengths of the proposal included its fit with existing infrastructure (asserted, but not substantiated through a cross-reference to a supported equipment list), support for virtually any WAN connection (Fibre Channel not required) and its flexibility in terms of target host platforms.
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