Enterprises drive the disaster recovery market

In India, large banks like Citibank, ICICI Bank and HDFC Bank, which have data centres in place, have gone ahead and implemented disaster recovery (DR) solutions. GE’s Indian call centre has five DR sites in the country. Petroleum majors likes BPCL and IOCL are using HP DR solutions. Some private and government telecom companies such as Tata Teleservices have also gone in for DR implementations.

Agendra Kumar, country manager of Veritas says, “Verticals like BFSI, telecom and oil companies are the main drivers of the DR market in India. These businesses are directly related to transactions and customer data which needs to be mirrored to a remote location so that their business does not get affected in case of any eventuality.”

Arun Rao, national manager of Storage at Computer Associates India says, “Enterprises are also looking at data mirroring sites in multiple locations depending upon their requirements. Certain companies have many sites that are continuously operating at the same time and, therefore, if a disaster was to occur the other site or location would take over.”

Basu adds that companies that have their DR and data centres in the same city are now looking at moving the DR to another city. Global Trust Bank, a client of HP, with its primary DR site in Mumbai has set up its second DR site in Hyderabad. Some of the DR implementations are using asynchronous DR that eliminates performance degradation and allows the secondary site to be located at any distance from the primary site.

SANs make it easier for companies to make backups and enable disaster recovery. Data can be mirrored to a remote location for seamless disaster recovery or backed up quickly to another location without affecting network speeds. SANs provide a variety of network-enabled techniques—such as alternate paths, clustering, failover, mirroring, and replication—that protect against data loss and improve the availability of information.