IBM Business Continuity and Resiliency Services (BCRS) team helps clients protect their mission-critical information and maintain continuous business operations, with help from Cisco MDS solutions and Cisco Services.

Business Continuance describes the processes, procedures and technology solutions an organization puts in place to ensure that essential business functions can continue after a disruption. A good business continuance plan consists of risk analysis, contingency planning, and a disaster recovery plan that includes technology solutions to address recovery and data protection needs of business-critical applications. The cost of outage, whether due to natural disasters, power failure, or malicious acts, is usually in tens of thousands of dollars to Millions, depending upon the nature of the business.

Recently, IBM BCRS in the United Kingdom engaged with a new operating entity of a world-leading financial services organization, to ensure that the organization's business data was backed up and preserved in the event of a disruption. The client chose IBM Managed Backup offerings. To support the customer requirements, IBM had to build the SAN infrastructure from the ground up, it teamed with Cisco to create and implement a dedicated, large-scale, best-of-class enterprise SAN solution.

The client's primary need was to establish a backup infrastructure and processes for maximum resiliency.  The client organization has more than a petabyte of data now and expects storage needs to increase by 500 TB year over year. Hence scalability was a huge concern.  The SAN switching core must be able to easily accommodate growth and maintain high performance.

Business Challenge faced by the client is summarized here

• Deliver high-quality managed backup services for new operating entity of world-leading client
• Build in high scalability to meet future demands
• Deploy new large-scale SAN on time

Network Solution

The new SAN design spanned across two locations connect by DWDM links ( see network diagram below).  For the SAN core, IBM chose Cisco MDS 9513 Multilayer Directors-high-performance, multi-protocol, director-class. For edge switches, IBM chose Cisco MDS 9148 Multilayer Fabric Switches. This high-performance, flexible platforms deliver the industry's highest port density and lowest power consumption available in a compact one rack-unit (1RU) chassis form factor.

The two locations are connected using 4