My name is John Cheng, System Consultant of a soccer gaming company. Recently our senior management is considering for a disaster recovery site to ensure business continuity in case of unexpected disasters. Our database runs on Informix using Sun Microsystem F6800 configured with 12CPU of speed 750MHz and the total data contents is within 30GB. However the system has a very high disk contention I/O rate (at peak hours) of 1,800 writes per second in the region of 1,000 to 13,000 KB for one write I/O.
As a result, SAN may not be a good solution since it is not hungry for disk space. On the other hand, software data replication seems having a higher system degradation than SAN. Among the software replication, there are products like Informix Enterprise Replication, Veritas etc. I have been thinking of using asynchronized data replication to avoid too much system degradation but I don’t have much knowledge on which is a better product. To me, system performance is at a higher priority than data loss. We need real time data replication since we don’t want to prolong the system recovery time. Cost is not a considering factor although we would like to minimize it if possible.
Any ideas or suggestions from your experience which you would like to share with me are most welcome. Please write down your rationale for your suggestions as well. Thanks very much in advance.