GE opts for multiple disaster recovery sites

GE’s Indian call centre, which generates mountains of customer data, has invested in five DR sites spread across the country to deal with any natural or man-made disasters. GE’s data has been growing fast and today has reached 15 terabytes across five locations. GE decided to implement NetApp’s NAS solution and DR over the WAN. Ashis Guha, regional manager of Network Appliance India says, “GE stores each and every detail of its customers. They were finding it difficult to manage data spread across various servers. Being a call centre, GE cannot afford even a second of downtime. They wanted to consolidate their data using NAS and then plan for DR sites and therefore zeroed in on NetApp.”

Instead of putting all the eggs in the one basket, GE decided to have infrastructure and manpower spread across five sites so that at any given point of time, even if one site fails, another can take over immediately. The company has two sites each in Gurgaon and Hyderabad and one in Bangalore to deal with catastrophic situations.

GE has implemented NetApp’s Clustered Storage Solution with SnapMirror. All the critical data is mirrored over the WAN to another location, thereby, all sites have the data of their own, and that of the other five sites available. Guha says, “At any point if a site fails, the users are pointed to another site, without any downtime. We are using asynchronous mirroring across the WAN.”

Each site has a cluster solution, eliminating a single point of failure. If one storage head fails, the other will take over. Secondly, in case a user deletes a file, he can recover it in a few seconds using snapshot technology. In effect, the solution takes care of hardware, software and application failures.