For Steinbach's disaster-recovery plan, gaining access over fiber from the credit union's local buildings to carrier services was too expensive. Quotes for a link from Steinbach to its DR site in Winnipeg, including last-mile access, ran between $50,000 and $70,000 per month, the company says. This was prohibitively expensive and threatened to derail the credit union's DR strategy.
By building its own radio transmission towers and installing Proxim Corp. (Nasdaq: PROX) wireless Ethernet bridge products, Steinbach worked out that it could run IP network traffic directly between its facilities in Steinbach and Winnipeg without third-party carriers or expensive last-mile services.
"It was a eureka! moment," says Van Dale.
XIOtech's Magnitude storage arrays and REDI SAN Links replication software provide synchronized copies of data at both sites, while Nishan Systems Inc.'s IP storage switches provide the Fibre Channel-to-iFCP protocol conversion required to send the SAN traffic over the wireless Ethernet/IP network.
As shown in the diagram below, the SAN/WAN link provides 100-Mbit/s (200-Mbit/s full-duplex) wireless Ethernet transmission between Steinbach and Winnipeg. Of the 100 Mbit/s available bandwidth, 65 Mbit/s (approximately 8 Mbyte/s) is reserved for data replication enabled by XIOtech's replicator software. For DR purposes, 500 Gbytes of Microsoft Corp.
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IT leaders should heed the guidance of cybersecurity insurance providers who think businesses should prioritize security education, incident preparedness, regular internal audits, and ongoing vulnerability scanning and patching.
