We dispatched an RFP seeking a comprehensive data-protection solution for fictional retailer Darwin's Groceries. Darwin's has reason to worry: As the company expanded from its minimart roots, it launched a chain of SuperGigantic stores, many of which wreaked havoc with local small businesses. New stores are being met with sometimes-violent demonstrations, and management fears that "anti-Darwin's malcontents" will figure out that the company's smart use of technology is a key reason it can keep prices so low and will decide to target its technology infrastructure.
Examples of Darwin's data-collection tactics: Cash registers forward purchase information back to a central server in each store, and wireless handheld computers with scanning wands are used by staff to update stock reports. Nightly, information collected at stores is transmitted to a centralized data-storage platform at headquarters. Once data is collected at HQ, it's replicated and directed both to a process that updates store-management and inventory-control systems and to the company's tape-backup process. Then, some data is abstracted for use in a data warehouse that helps Darwin's spot trends to boost revenue and reduce costs.
Darwin's wants to ensure that its data is well-protected during collection, transport and storage. It's also seeking to improve its storage infrastructure and management capabilities to enable storage and data protection to scale nondisruptively, and to provide better information on the status of storage-related replication and backup processes. The company is interested in exploring disk-to-disk data-replication strategies but has thus far been unable to find a vendor that can support its heterogeneous storage infrastructure. Ultimately, the company would like to use tape for archive- and disk-based replication for disaster recovery.
The company would also like to consider cost-effective methods for replicating its headquarters infrastructure at an alternate site so that business will continue uninterrupted in the event of a fire or an interruption in network services.
In our RFP, we asked for a system that could:
Replicate mission-critical data reliably and securely across a WAN so that the remote data copy is synchronized to within five minutes of the original and is available for use by applications within 30 minutes of an interruption of normal processing operations.
Host replicated data on storage platforms or topologies in the production environment that don't replicate on
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