NEC Delivers New Disaster Recovery Solution

Enterprise Networks & Servers, May 2004

NEC Solutions (America) has introduced the NEC Disaster Recovery Fault Tolerant (FT) Solution, an enterprise-grade disaster recovery solution that allows companies to recover from virtually any infrastructure system failure.

Built with NEC's EXPRESSCLUSTER software, Express5800/320Lb server and S1300 storage platforms, the Disaster Recovery FT Solution protects mission-critical data in the event of the destruction of local computing resources, while allowing surviving resources to continue working with access to the latest data.

"The primary objective of a disaster recovery plan is to enable an organization to survive a computer room disaster and to reestablish normal business operations in just a few minutes. In order to survive, an organization must ensure that critical operations can resume within a reasonable timeframe," said Larry Sheffield, senior vice president of the Solutions Platform Group for NEC Solutions America. "NEC's Disaster Recovery FT Solution is designed to minimize the duration of a serious disruption to business operations, facilitate effective coordination of recovery tasks, and most important, reduce the complexity of the recovery effort."

NEC's Disaster Recovery FT Solution offers the following benefits.

* Up to 99.999% Hardware Availability: Server and storage technology minimizes chances of remote failover operations that require service interruptions, failover and fail back operational risks.

* Automatic Failover via WAN: Seamless operations between fault tolerant procedures in local failures and disaster recovery procedures.

* Disaster Recovery in Minutes: Node heartbeat monitoring detects whether a cluster node is functional, and then enables to failover within minutes.

* Data Integrity: Application data mirroring technology provides complete data integrity between production local database and remote one.

* One-Stop Support: NEC Solutions America provides total solution support including hardware, software and services.

* High Performance Storage: Fault tol- erant S1300 storage from NEC complements the fault tolerant servers with fully redundant hardware providing nearly 4TB of fiber channel storage capacity.

At the core of NEC's Disaster Recovery FT Solution is a scalable and flexible clustering software solution that provides automatic recovery. When a fault occurs at the server, the software understands that the server is designed with fault tolerant hardware. However, in the event of a data center-level disaster that destroys the whole server, the EXPRESSCLUSTER software automatically detects the loss of the server and instantly instructs another server to take over the workload of the faulty server, allowing the users to access all their applications and data to continue to operate. Using virtual IP addresses and virtual computer names enables a server to be reconnected without renaming of the devices or the client appli- cation being aware that the server was switched.

The power behind NEC's Disaster Recovery FT Solution is the Express5800/ 320Lb server which is designed to provide mission-critical applications with contin- uous availability in a compact, rack-mount (4U) or pedestal platform. The Dual Modular Redundant design of the Express5800/ 320Lb allows easy replacement of major subsystems without interruption of processing.

The unique dual-modular hardware, architecture is comprised of redundant subsystems executing all processing in lockstep to virtually eliminate any single point of failure while safeguarding data integrity. These CPU subsystems perform the same instructions at the same time, with instantaneous failover to the redundant subsystem in the event of hardware failure.