EMC, Nortel team on data recovery services

ORLANDO -- In order to enable better remote mirroring of enterprise data, technology partners EMC Corp. and Nortel Networks Ltd. have banded together again, this time to deliver a joint business continuity service to their respective customers.
Announced last week at the Storage Networking World event in Orlando, the new service is designed to help corporations cost-effectively and easily take advantage of optical metropolitan-area network and wide-area network connectivity options for off-site data mirroring.
The Business Continuity Over Optical Networks service includes a business continuity assessment from both EMC and Nortel to assist customers in determining the right storage and connectivity requirements to meet their disaster recovery needs. The service uses EMC's networked storage systems including Symmetrix and Clariion in addition to its Symmetrix Remote Data Facility, Symmetrix Remote Data Facility--Asynchronous and MirrorView remote replication software, combined with Brampton, Ontario-based Nortel's Optera Metro 5000 Multiservice dense wavelength division multiplexing system.
"Information protection has taken on new importance over the past several years, and customers and companies of all sizes are looking for ways to safeguard their information," explained Rick Lacroix, a spokesman for EMC in Hopkinton, Mass. "This solution is a service offering that allows customers to select the systems and software from EMC that will protect their information the way they want to protect it and to use the Nortel transport mechanism to conduct the remote mirroring of their data."
With more than 200 joint installations completed as partners during the past three years, the companies have focused efforts on finding best practices for extending application data over distance. This collected information has been embedded into a series of tools that allows the companies to cascade it over a broader area, said Jack Hunt, Nortel's director of marketing for optical storage solutions in Ottawa.

With the recent power outages that swept much of North America, Hunt explained, redundant data mirroring and replication have taken on a whole new level of importance. He said that although many organizations typically have some sort of synchronous data replication technology -- simply storing data from one point to another -- many enterprises, including the Vancouver City Savings Credit Union (VanCity), are also looking at asynchronous replication.
Tony Fernandes, vice president of technology infrastructure at Inventure Solutions Inc., VanCity's IT subsidiary in Vancouver, British Columbia, said that although synchronous data transmission is a great option, unless you are a gigantic company that can afford to spend millions of dollars on telecommunications, it can be quite expensive.
He explained that VanCity has been working with