Recovery Team

In the wake of Hurricane Katrina, government agencies all over the country are reevaluating the resilience of their IT infrastructures. They understand very clearly that reliable disaster recovery capabilities for key IT systems play a central role in maintaining crucial services in times of chaos.

A good recovery plan begins with the right equipment. For 10 years, Xiotech has been at the leading edge of storage innovation. At a time when users were being told that complexity was the price they had to pay for performance, Xiotech made the power of the SAN (Storage Area Network) available to small to mid-size organizations. For a decade, Xiotech's Magnitude family of easy-to-use storage management products has formed the core of disaster recovery strategies for many government bodies.

Xiotech's innovative SAN technology eliminates the one-to-one relationship between servers and traditional storage devices. Instead, the Magnitude® family of storage products provides a shared pool of virtualized storage that multiple servers and applications can use and access.

Xiotech's Magnitude 3D® storage system is architected to be failure and disaster tolerant. Its unique clustered architecture allows critical components to be separated by as much as 300 meters. Individual elements can fail or be taken offline without disrupting services. For added disaster resilience, government agencies can use Xiotech's TimeScale^TM replication appliance and replicate their data across any distance.

Furthermore, Xiotech® SAN solutions dramatically streamline storage management. The company's Magnitude 3D and Magnitude storage systems can be configured and updated on the fly without downtime or disruption to end-users -- a valuable part of the recovery arsenal when disaster strikes.

"Connecting servers back to their data and bringing them up has never been an easy thing to do," said Rob Peglar, vice president of technology marketing for Xiotech. "Instead of saying you must have a specific server and specific drive, we say forget that. We have the concept of a virtual disk, which is essentially a bunch of space that is divided on the storage array and can be made available to any server,
at any time with the click of a mouse.

"You can make this logical connection between a server and data in five seconds; it doesn't matter how many drives there are or what rack position they're in. That is a big part of why we can do disaster recovery faster than anybody else can," he explained.

The ease of deployment and management of Xiotech's storage solutions answers a key concern for governments, particularly small jurisdictions where IT staff often are stretched precariously thin.

In the past, disaster recovery relied on a complex, illogical collection of parts. Management of such architectures was relegated to longtime staff or expensive outside vendors, and training of new employees was difficult at best.

"What ended up in the public sector was a big mishmash of equipment," said Peglar. "You couldn't manage or keep track of it."

Xiotech enables agencies to replace inefficient direct-attached storage with manageable SAN solutions that let jurisdictions easily replicate key data for disaster recovery and business continuity purposes. What's more, these solutions boost everyday storage efficiency and slash management requirements.

"Small IT shops in city and county governments struggle to find enough staff to keep up with demands," said Peglar. "We offer sophisticated, easy-to-use technology to address not only the storage problem, but also data replication."

Downtime can be deadly for citizens who depend on government services. How long can an agency wait to recover from disaster? How old can data be and still be usable? Xiotech delivers tools that empower government agencies to quickly respond to situations that threaten critical operations.

"Imagine if you could recover in 30 seconds," Peglar said. "Imagine walking over to another machine and all of a sudden it had your data,