Keeping the business running 24 by 7.

Byline: Jennifer Jacobs

HAVING an updated copy of your critical data in a remote location seems to be a good idea as companies located in the World Trade Center Twin Towers in New York would probably testify.

However, since no one else seriously expects another September 11-style building collapse, many companies would flinch at the cost involved in setting up storage equipment in another suitably-removed location for the remote eventuality that your building blows up or is torched to the ground.

EMC's Jon Murray, however, points out that the remote mirroring sites can be used as more than a back-up in cases of emergency.

Murray, who is EMC's regional programme manager for infrastructure and business continuance, said the second copy can in fact be put to good use to generate revenue and ensure that the business is running when maintenance or housekeeping work needs to be done on the system.

"There's a statistic from Gartner that says 85 per cent of the time you can't get the data you want, it's not because of a disaster, but due to something you control yourself such as backing up the data to tape, moving a data centre, upgrading the server or whatever operational task which requires your system to be offline.

"And this is where the second copy comes in. Our customers have found that they can use the second copy to do all these housekeeping and maintenance activities, most of which are revenue generating applications.

"So they can keep their business running at all times in the primary site and do all the housekeeping work on the secondary site, which also acts as a back-up copy.

"This is …