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Computerworld - After three years of work, brokerage Edward Jones & Co. is beginning to see some benefits from an $80 million investment in a storage-over-IP network that is replicating up to 700GB of data daily to a fully redundant backup site located 1,600 miles away from its main data center near St. Louis.
Edward Jones CIO Rich Malone said last week that the Maryland Heights, Mo.-based company is still "a long way from being where we need to be" on the project. But over the past year, Edward Jones has reduced its overall data backup window from 12 hours to four, while more than doubling the amount of information it replicates to its secondary data center in Tempe, Ariz.
"At the beginning of the year, we ran 96 hours behind with our database replication," said Bill Hayden, director of data services at Edward Jones. "Four days behind is nowhere near the service level I was expected to provide."
Most of the improvements over the past year have come through software upgrades and fine-tuning the systems in the two data centers, he said.
According to Dianne McAdam, an analyst at Data Mobility Group LLC in Nashua, N.H., it's still rare for a financial services firm the size of Edward Jones to be using a storage-over-IP network and asynchronous replication technology. Most large brokerages continue to rely on synchronous replication "because they can't afford to lose any transactions and they need the performance of a high-bandwidth fiber connection," McAdam said.
Edward Jones, which began the storage project in 2001 (see story), is using the IP-based technology to link a storage-area network (SAN) in its headquarters data center to one in the Tempe facility. The network is built on Fibre Channel-over-IP switches from CNT Corp., plus data replication and mirroring tools from EMC Corp., E-Net Corp., Quest Software Inc. and Network Appliance Inc.

Edward Jones uses an IP network to replicate 700GB of daily data to a backup site 1,600 miles from its headquarters near St. Louis. Image Credit: Edward Jones & Co.

The project's goal is to enable Edward Jones to shift its transaction-processing activities from St. Louis to Tempe without a hiccup. "When we get to where we want to go, [disaster recovery] will become a thing of the past," Malone said. "It becomes, 'OK, I've got trouble at one data center. I'm going to shift the load to the other center.'"
The asynchronous replication approach has proved to be reliable, Malone said. But some technical issues remain. One major challenge is synchronizing all