In the 2/26/07 Wikibon Storage Research meeting (see Storage ménage à trois for disaster recovery testing) we concluded that certain core infrastructure industries need to consider architecting a three-node data center to improve testing and resiliancy.
As a result, we believe vendors should aggressively tune and publish three-node data center roadmaps and technology directions. Successful vendors will architect solutions that reduce transmission costs as this is the main gate to lag times at the C site. This includes 'pull' versus 'push' technologies for replication and disaster tolerance. Vendors who are in a position to incorporate these directions within RFP's will gain competitive advantage.
Action Item: Suppliers should consider adding what we call 'C-site services' to their portfolios, specifically, services that provide on-demand access to third site recovery capabilities as an outsourced function. We expect C-site services to emerge over the next five years in a Software as a Service (SaaS) model led by the likes of Sunguard, IBM and perhaps others such as EMC.
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