Or a reasonable facsimile thereof
If you are interested in Disaster Recovery check out Axxana. They solve the limited synchronous data copy distance problem with a black box designed for data. Concept is simple but getting the details right is hard.

The problem
Synchronous replication requires that apps wait until the remote site completes the write. Given the speed of light, that means that synch sites can’t be very far away. Certainly not the 300 miles the SEC would like to see for financial institutions – we still have a few of those, don’t we?

Axxana’s answer
No matter what happens in a plane crash, they always seem to be able to recover the “black box” that tells them what the plane was doing shortly before the crash. Axxana has developed a black box for data centers.

Here’s how they describe it:

The Phoenix Black Box is located near the storage system at the primary data center and records a synchronous data stream from the storage. At the same time, an asynchronous data replication system is moving data to a secondary data center (the remote recovery site). The Phoenix Black Box has to protect only the Gigabytes of data that would have been lost in a typical asynchronous replication scenario. Data is protected inside the Black Box during the course of the disaster and can be immediately extracted.

Data extraction is achieved either by:

  • Physically locating the system by tracking the homing signal and connecting a laptop with an Axxana software component to the Phoenix Systemâ„¢ at the disaster site, or
  • The self sufficient and well protected system transferring the data to the secondary site using highly resilient cellular broadband technology.

Your data phones home after a disaster.

Compelling economics
It will take a while to suss out all the implications, but one simple scenario is a company with 3 data centers around the world could in-source their DR strategy with the equivalent of synchronous data recovery. How much would that save?

Distribution
They are working with as many of the major vendors as they can to get the product to you through people you already deal with. Expect to see some announcements.

The StorageMojo take
They are in contention for StorageMojo’s “coolest new product as SNW” award. It looks like they can handle anything up to an A-bomb blast. If that happens even synchronous data replication may not work. Besides, a dirty bomb is much more likely. Happy thoughts, eh?

Comments welcome, of course. Guys, sorry if I jumped the gun. But when I saw the web site was up . . . .