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Case Study:
Anue Systems Network Emulator
Validates Disaster Recovery Solution
Summary
A major information service tests their Disaster Recovery solution in the lab environment, insuring their business-critical applications will continue to function in instances that the network quality suffers an outage or serious impairments.
Client Profile
The client is a global information company providing
indispensable information tailored for professionals in the
financial services, media and corporate markets. Over
300,000 financial market professionals working in financial
markets around the world use the client’s products. They rely
on these services to provide them with the information and
tools they need to run their businesses.
Project Initiative
With thousands of users and businesses dependent on the
client’s service, it was critical that their SAN systems perform
uninterrupted. The company suffered an unexpected outage
of their main system and when their back-up system took over
operations they experienced significant issues caused by the
distance between their backup system and central router.
Their service was not interrupted but the experience identified
some critical flaws with their current disaster recovery
solution.
As a result, the company developed a new disaster recovery plan for implementation
over the course of six months. Their headquarters, which services all of Europe,
needed to test every known possible scenario within their Disaster Recovery plan for
both their existing network setup and their future network implementation. The
client purchased an Anue Systems Network Emulator to enable this testing to be
conducted in the lab environment, not affecting any of the live services yet providing
the ability to test production system scenarios.
Project Implementation
The project team managing both the existing SAN network and the implementation
of their upgraded network plan knew they had to be prepared for anything. It is
imperative that the back-up network infrastructure perform without a hitch should
there be any problem whatsoever with the primary network server system. The
team wanted to test the back-up network’s performance over significant distances as
well as test the network’s resilience up to one hundred kilometers or other network
impairments.
The Anue Solution at Work
For these testing requirements, the team selected the Anue Fibre Channel Network
Emulators. Upon installation of the devices the team immediately tested the effects
of delay between their two current network centers. This gave the team the
confidence they needed that their existing failover system would perform should
there be any issue with their main SAN system. The team is now focused on the
implementation of new data centers and disaster recovery planning and with the
Anue Emulators in place; they know they’ll be able to test everything in the lab
before switching over to the new infrastructure.
Customer Value
In today’s world, no one can predict the issues that might occur on a network, there
are many hazards to anticipate. And with major financial markets relying on the
client’s data being accessible at all times, the value is clear. Their customers will be
able to maintain connectivity to the network when the network is stressed, and
allowing the company to can reliably and effectively as they always have. Being able
to test and validate this in a lab environment is of inestimable value.
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