Business Continuity Goes Wider

Business-continuity systems present a number of challenges. Not only must they back up and store applications and data, but they must make that information available so a business can get back on its feet quickly. For some companies, quickly means systems are available within minutes or less.

Fulcrum Global Partners is one of those businesses. Analysts at the research firm study companies and their stocks and file reports to leading financial-services companies.

"Stuff happens, and things break, but I can't afford to be down," says Ron Ferrentino, CIO at Fulcrum.

Fulcrum had been using a business-continuity system based on hardware and software from Stratus Technologies International, but Ferrentino believed he needed to change the IT infrastructure because when the Windows-based system crashed, it took too long to move the data to an alternate server. "I need to get off any downed server quickly," he says.

Fulcrum moved to business-continuity software from XOsoft Inc. that would let the company fail over data across a WAN and rewind the SQL Server database to a precorruption state. "They helped us find a bulletproof environment," Ferrentino says.

XOsoft earlier this month added more security, increased usability, and new reporting and time-saving scheduling tools to its WANSyncHA software. The software will support the IBM AIX Unix operating system for the first time and provide faster replication and synchronization.

The reporting tools can measure and optimize infrastructure components that could impact recovery times, including server efficiency and network bandwidth utilization. A new API lets third-party vendors easily integrate WANSync into their own storage systems and storage-management products. WANSync is priced from $2,000 to $5,000 per license; the high-availability WANSyncHA is $4,500 to $9,000 per license.

XOsoft has gained share in the high-end replication market and is the first vendor to support wide-area failover, says Steve Duplessie, founder and analyst at Enterprise Storage Group. "Customers are finally doing something about business continuity," he says. "Most companies aren't going to spend a million bucks to protect their E-mail. But they might spend $100,000."

This story was modified Aug. 16.