Remote Site Storage Considerations
Managing distributed computing resources can be challenging for many reasons, including the complexity inherent in globally expanding customer bases, corporate acquisitions, and business to business transactions.
Managing remote sites effectively depends in large part upon how well the existing site infrastructure works with the central management site. The greater the differences in network components, attached devices, and system software between the sites, the more difficult it is to manage. You can also opt to outsource IT support for remote sites if the site's importance warrants the expense.
On This Page
 | Centralized Remote Site Access and Management |
| Connectivity and Performance |
| Security |
| Data Protection |
| Additional Resources |
Centralized Remote Site Access and Management
Remote sites—whether a satellite office, a datacenter, or a disaster recovery location—usually have few users per location, and depending on the site's function, may lack qualified IT personnel. By connecting all the remote LAN sites to the central LAN site (in a hub and spoke topology) using the point to point WAN (wide area network) communication protocol and technologies, users can access corporate resources without the need for any additional network infrastructure. In this way IT staff at the central site can also protect, manage, and regulate remote site operations.
Connectivity and Performance
One of the drawbacks of using WAN connections to access corporate data is that the process can be extremely slow. The more users who connect to access data, the longer the requests take to send. Distance also impacts data transmission speed. The greater the distance, the greater the latency, that is, the time it takes to transfer data from point A to B. Latency is very important when replicating data to a remote site for disaster recovery purposes. Also, if the WAN link is unreliable, users at remote sites will not have access to central data during the outage.
When accessing data from a central storage network, such as a SAN, iSCSI connectivity can provide gigabit Ethernet speeds over WAN distances. Fibre Channel over IP is an emerging technology that promises high speed Fibre Channel benefits over long distances.
Security
Remote sites that are not properly secured can be a liability for the entire organization. If your organization uses VPN (virtual private network) technologies on top of the WAN connection, you should ensure that the remote sites follow the security guidelines set by the central office.
Data Protection
A number of different strategies work well for protecting data. The strategy that you choose will depend on your organization's specific goals: data protection, adherence to regulatory standards, or disaster recovery.
| • | Remote Backup Backing up data over the Internet to a storage system at a remote site provides extra protection against data loss as a result of viruses or natural disaster. Remote backup is automated; data can be encrypted for extra security and compressed for better bandwidth performance, also known as online backup. | ||||
| • | Remote Archiving Unlike remote backup, remote archiving is intended for long-term storage and retrieval, usually for purposes such as regulation adherence. Copies of archived data are not rotated out for more up-to-date copies (as in the case of remote backup), but are kept for the length of time mandated by regulatory bodies. | ||||
| • | Replication Replication of data to a remote site provides protection against large scale disasters such as loss of the primary data storage site. There are two types of replication:
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Additional Resources
Branch Office Data Consolidation: A New Paradigm in Data Protection