– Liat Malki, Director of Marketing at Axxana, says:
Everyone loves twins, and we’re proud to congratulate our colleague who recently became the father of twins. If you have twins, you’re so happy, you don’t even think about the cost. That’s true of twin babies, but it’s not true with twin data centers.
During a recent webinar there was an interesting discussion. Gil Chaouat, Axxana’s director of product management, discussed a global company with which he had recently met. The company has two data centers in every region. Two data centers per region is a common approach for organizations like this that want to deliver a zero data loss environment. There were two things that really stood out for me:
- Two data centers per region is really expensive
- One is sometimes better than two
For this particular company, one of the biggest costs, in addition to the cost of the second data center in every region, was the cost of the high-speed fiber connections between each of the two data centers. And, of course, because fiber connections can break, they had to have two. Twice the cost. They used fiber connections, because they wanted synchronous data replication. It was the only way they could deliver zero data loss. So why is one data center better than two?
This company had no replication between regions. That would have added even more cost, and they wanted to reduce spending, not increase it. And replication between regions, which for them would have been North America to Europe and Europe to Asia, can only be done asynchronously, which means they will lose data in a disaster.
What they are discussing is eliminating the second data center and implementing Axxana’s black box. That way they can use asynchronous replication over IP lines between regions, eliminate the cost of the redundant fiber links, and use Axxana to deliver zero data loss. Doing this also ensures zero data loss in regional disasters, disasters which might have impacted both data centers in one region. So in this scenario, one is better than two.
Of course, when it comes to babies, two is better than one.
