One of the biggest challenges faced in achieving high availability in remote office/branch office (ROBO) environments is managing multiple sites without requiring technically trained staff locally and without having to depend on centrally based/external IT to visit on site to resolve issues.
Central management enables IT administrators to resolve issues from a central location without having to leave the comfort of their desk (To be fair they could do with a little sunshine). So central management means no more IT staff at local sites and no more IT travel expenses, right?
Well central management means you can manage the site centrally (duh!) but without high availability, you’re in the same situation, as if the server goes down……you guessed it, pack your bags.
But traditionally to achieve high availability, you would implement a SAN or a NAS into a 2-3 server infrastructure. That’s great, if you have $40,000 spare to spend on each site (And that’s just the SAN.)
But on top of that, essentially a physical SAN / NAS is a single point of failure. This means that if and when it fails, the benefits of central management are redundant, as it would require an IT person on site to get it back online.
An SVA like SvSAN, on the other hand, is the ideal safety net for multi-site environments, as it mirrors information across multiple servers, meaning that it can fail, as can any one of the servers, and business applications can continue until the issues are resolved centrally.