Backup / Disaster Recovery of Distributed Systems

The business world is growing increasingly flat, spreading even the smallest work forces over distance. Employees areseemingly always on the move, constantly meeting with customers or distributors and making sure the supplied chain flows unabated. Salesmen rarely come into the office anymore, instead, checking e-mails from their PDA or cell phones and only coming into the office to attend meetings or to pick up a paycheck. Even your company’s desk jockeys are getting into the action, telecommuting from home or the local coffee shop, able to access to corporate network from anywhere with an internet connection.

Perhaps your organization is set up in a campus environment, like a health care center, university, or city government, with staff spread throughout multiple buildings over several square blocks. However, your structure, your business, it is increasingly rare today for any company to house its entire work force under one roof.

Despite this shift to a distributed model, it is important that every employee has access to the business tools and information they need to do their job. This responsibility falls to the IT organization, an increasingly critical component of any company’s mission. However, managing a distributed IT infrastructure presents all sorts of complexity, consistency, compliance, and cost issues. At the same time, backing up mission - critical business data that is being created, stored, and archived across an increasingly distributed geographic area, is growing in importance as well, and is absolutely vital to the long-term health of the business and the ability to ensure compliance of industry and government regulations.