Tim Hays, VP of IT at Animal Health International, will discuss his the quest for an affordable zero data loss solution at the next Wikibon Peer Incite meeting. The company, a distributor of premier food and health products for cattle, horses, poultry, swine, cats, and dogs, was formed by the merger of Lextron Inc. and Walco International Inc. It runs a totally virtualized data center and was among the first companies to run SAP in a virtual- server environment.

Hays initially planned to move all his data onto a single SAN and replicate that to a second data center where he could duplicate the entire company infrastructure. This would provide very short RTOs for virtually any event short of a regional disaster that impacted both data centers. However, he discovered that synchronous replication was too expensive both in initial equipment acquisition cost and ongoing bandwidth expense.

Rather than resign himself and the company to a possible 15-30 minutes of data loss in an event as common as a power outage, he searched for alternatives that would provide a better compromise between the zero data loss ideal and the company IT budget to protect its $5 million/day in real-time order entry from interruption. What he discovered and what he eventually proposed to his CEO can provide a useful guide for other companies seeking a better data recovery solution.

As part of the presentation the Wikibon community will discuss several relevant questions including:

• What is the value of zero RPO?
• Who needs to be involved in the zero RPO decision?
• How does real-time order entry impact decisions regarding disaster recovery?
• How does peak volume impact the sizing of synchronous replication solutions?
• How does distance impact the ability to deliver a zero data loss environment?
• What is the value of providing a zero data loss environment for non-production applications?
• How has virtualization changed disaster recovery testing?
• How can your organization deal more effectively with WAN link failures?

The Peer Incite is open to the public without charge either as an interactive teleconference or a one-way webcast on www.siliconangle.tv. It is scheduled for Tuesday, April 10, from 12:00-1:00 p.m. ET (9:00-10:00 PT).