SAN administrators must first address a variety of concerns before deciding to make a change to their current environment:
Performance
- How will my application perform when I go beyond a data center over the WAN?
Extended Distance
- How far can I go?
- What is the impact of distance on my existing applications?
Management of Two Separate Data Centers
- How do I manage a remote data center?
- How can I meet my service-level agreement (SLA) when my data goes over a WAN or metropolitan-area network (MAN)?
Complexity of Design and Deployment
- What are the various types of business-continuance and disaster-recovery applications?
- How do I start?
Solution Cost
- How do I minimize the monthly recurring charge (MRC) of the WAN pipe?
- Do I deploy a separate business-continuance and disaster-recovery network for each SAN island?
Availability
- If one application goes down it may impact others; how can I avoid this?
- What happens if my WAN link goes down?
- What are my points of failure?
- Will the solution scale to future requirements?
Security
- What are the potential security threats created by business-continuance and disaster-recovery applications?
- How do I preserve the integrity and privacy of the data?
