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Website mirroring is another alternative companies have been using. Mirroring involves setting up an exact replica of an existing website in a separate datacenter, whether across town or on the other side of the world. Although this practice can be useful, it does have several weaknesses. It is often used by owners of large websites seeking to offer copies of their content to geographically dispersed audiences, as well as keeping data backed up. The problem, however, is that if the original site crashes, the surviving site needs to be taken down, at least temporarily, to make another backup. Then when it goes live again, the surviving site also runs the risk of crashing because it cannot handle, alone, the traffic originally intended for both sites.
Vendors and service providers say it is just a matter of time before online business recovery becomes a common alternative to tape and eventually replaces it entirely. Jostling for the new market has already begun with competition coming down to the cost of bandwidth, and owners of new datacenters are being dragged into this business for reasons of value-added services and differentiating from competition.
Bandwidth Better?
One of the popular, more recent alternatives is to make real-time backups of data via a network, saving the information to hard drives in datacenters in locations geographically separated from the main site. Unlike mirroring, which delivers the content to the Web from both places, this alternative just records data, unless the original data has been lost or corrupted. Then the backed-up data can be downloaded from storage within moments of being requested.
New advances in networking technology pit competitors like the troubled Yipes Communication (www.yipes.com), which ride newer networks designed solely for IP data flow, against older carriers like AT&T (www.att.com), which retrofit voice networks to support data. Both compete for customers like Lightbridge in disaster recovery-related deals.
AT&T is probably one of the most notable providers of disaster recovery solutions after September 11, having successfully supported its customers through the collapse of the World Trade Center (see sidebar, left).
Its newest Ultravailable Wavelength Service offers customers "lambdas" (bandwidth transmitted via individual colors of the light spectrum), selling them OC-3 interfaces with AT&T datacenters. The idea is that companies seeking to mirror sites or looking for pure online backup will be able to buy more bandwidth on the fly, especially in a crisis, scaling up or down the size of their connection within the limits of an OC-3 port.
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