Data replication helps prevent potential problems

The anticipation of day-long power outages and disruptive earthquakes that could cause downtime and lost transactions was on Tom Halen's mind when he decided he needed to replicate data from his financial network in San Francisco to a remote office in San Diego.

Halen, general manager at Golden Gate Financial Group, is using data replication software from Network Integrity. Dubbed Real-time Replicator, the software lets customers continuously copy data from one site to another in real time as changes are made. In the event of a failure, up-to-the minute data can be retrieved from the remote site.

Numerous vendors, including IBM, EMC, Compaq and Veritas, have adopted data replication technology for Windows NT and Unix platforms from the mainframe, where data replication is common.

Robert Gray, an analyst at International Data Corp. in Framingham, Mass., says data replication software is prevalent in the banking industry, where its use is mandated. "It gives you a means of making data available 24-7 forever," Gray says. "More and more high-availability, high-end storage will be organized in configurations that have that disaster tolerant/disaster recovery capability."

Golden Gate Financial Group, which makes about $1 billion in trades per month, replicates 6.6G bytes of data over T-1 lines as changes are made from its head office in San Francisco to a remote office in San Jose in real time.

The company recouped its investment in Network Integrity's Real-time Replicator quickly last year when San Francisco was hit by a day-long power outage. Because data in the San Francisco office was replicated to San Jose, trading was only down a half-hour. Employees traveled to the San Jose, set up shop and used current replicated data to do their work.

"It was a matter of copying the replicated data to a working directory and accessing it," Halen says. "By the time we got to the San Jose office, we were already set up."

After the lights came back on, Golden Gate copied the data back to San Francisco and started work again.

"We are trading a few hundred million dollars on any given day, and with the market's volatility, we need to execute our orders and trades at any time," Halen says. Before Golden Gate installed the software, it copied data manually to from city to city.

At Merrill Lynch, which is also using Network Integrity software, 2G bytes of critical financial information has to be distributed daily to three remote offices for use by staff. Previously, IS staff copied the data by batch file scripts manually from Princeton, N.J., to remote offices in San Francisco and San Diego once per week. Now data is updated two times each day to NT servers in each remote location - once at midnight and again at noon. Only changed data amounting to about 200M bytes is sent, thus saving bandwidth and time.

Now users have access to the latest data and it's local, residing on a file server where they work, says Richard Ens, NT systems manager. Merrill Lynch paid off its data replication costs in a month.