Phase 1 required the licensing of Softek's Replicator product for servers at headquarters, plus the purchase of 40 TB to 50 TB of direct-attached storage and servers to act as replication targets. Nice thing about the Softek bid was that it left the choice of servers and storage open: Expensive Tier 1, inexpensive Tier 2 or just about anything Darwin's might have locked away in its closets would do the trick. Softek also proposed to preserve Darwin's existing investment in high-end tape libraries for use in disaster recovery until a fully functional DR site could be established and made operational in Phase 2. In short, a centralized local replication with dump to tape was specified in the short term.
In Phase 2, Softek proposed that the Replicator system be extended across a WAN to a SuperGigantic store, built out to serve as a DR backup site. This was an interesting idea, if a bit naive: Seeing as Softek's parent company, Fujitsu, sells POS (point of sale) systems, it should have known that the only thing more expensive than data centers is retail space. The profitability of a retail or grocery store is directly proportional to the amount of square feet allocated to merchandise, so one could foresee store personnel beginning to fill IT recovery-center space with overstocked bananas and canned meat products.
Wherever the recovery site was located, some direct-attached arrays and servers would be installed in Phase 2. Softek proposed that its Storage Manager software then be added, both to scrub the data before replicating it through the enterprise and to manage the replication processes together with other aspects of the storage environment.
In Phase 3, Darwin's would deploy a SAN and use Replicator to migrate data from direct-attached storage to the new topology. The company would implement Softek SANView to manage the SAN, Softek Provisioner to perform heterogeneous LUN management and, optionally, Softek EnView to manage QoS (Quality of Service) and service-level compliance.
The writers at Softek seemed to get the message that Darwin's wanted to keep costs low while replicating a sizable amount of data locally and remotely. Softek's Replicator leverages existing infrastructure and low-cost build-out options, and supports existing IP networks between locations. Vendor-agnostic, the solution precludes any hardware lock-in.
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