Business Goals served by Copy Software
Worldwide commerce and industry have become increasingly dependent on IT
resources to conduct business. Even a temporary loss of critical applications or data access
can cause serious economic impact to a company, and an extended outage can threaten a
company’s existence. Regulatory and competitive pressures, coupled with the potential
financial impact of unavailable systems, have motivated IT executives to address availability
as one of their top priorities. Primarily because of these strict requirements on availability,
storage systems have been enhanced over the years to include “copy service” functions.
These hardware-assisted functions have allowed customers to minimize outages associated
with copying data for backups, maintain disaster recovery sites for critical data, create
business intelligence applications that use copies of production data, or simply move data
to newer hardware with a minimum of outage times.
Real-time/point-in-time copies heighten both data security and mobility for a variety
of critical activities, including protection, testing, disaster recovery, and warehousing. No
matter where the data is located, it can be replicated quickly and safely within the same
data center or between different data centers. This ability to share data within the enterprise
positions a business to respond quickly to competitive pressures and meet the fundamental
business goal of business agility. As shown in Table 5, software products provide the
functions of data migration, data duplication and remote copy. These functions are critical
to perhaps the two most important business objectives of the enterprise: 1) to maintain
business continuity in the face of adversity, such as disaster; 2) to rapidly deploy new IT
applications for business intelligence, data warehousing/OLAP, for data center relocation,
or for new application testing.
Hitachi Copy Products
Data Migration Data Duplication Remote Copy
Hitachi TrueCopy
™
Synchronous ✔✔ ✔- 25 Miles
5
Hitachi TrueCopy
™
Asynchronous ✔✔ ✔- Unlimited
distance
NanoCopy
™
✔✔
Software Asynchronous Remote ✔✔
Copy
™
(HXRC)
Hitachi ShadowImage
™
✔
Hitachi Data Protection Services ✔✔ ✔
Hitachi RapidXchange
™
✔
HARBOR
®
File Transfer
™
(HFT) ✔
Real-time/point-in-time
copies heighten both data
security and mobility for
a variety of critical
activities, including
protection, testing,
disaster recovery,
and warehousing.
Table 5 - Hitachi copy
products provide Remote
Copy, Data Duplication,
and Data Migration.
Hitachi Data Systems
36
5
25 miles is the current practical distance limitation for direct connection using ESCON
®
fibre.
This is changing with the advent of new networking devices. Synchronous remote copy may
also use telephone networks. However the performance of the production application must
be considered when using synchronous remote copy over long distances.