While superstorm destroyed homes and businesses, uprooting the lives of tens of thousands, an Israeli company ensured that data vital to millions remained up and running
David Shamah
The Times of Israel
12/10/2012
Hurricane Sandy created havoc along the East Coast, uprooting whole communities with super-strong winds and creating damage that many communities may not recover from for months. But the impact of Sandy had the potential to create far more extensive damage; had the data centers of the Northeast gone offline or sustained major damage, it would have had a devastating effect on businesses across the US, and maybe the world.
The computers that business and government rely on for their processing and the storage of their documents were all at severe risk; it was an Israeli disaster recovery company, Zerto, which played a key role in saving some of these important computer systems.
“The Cloud” — that ephemeral computer out in the ether that stores and processes data — is actually more than just a concept; it’s a network of physical computers that are located in cities and towns around the world. In the US, many of the key cloud systems are located in places such as Virginia, New Jersey, Lower Manhattan, Boston — in other words, the same places upon which Sandy unleashed her fury.
“There are numerous cloud systems that are critical to the functioning of government, insurance companies, banks, and many other financial institutions,” said Ziv Kedem, CEO of Zerto. “Without those systems, those institutions would just shut down. Our company provides replication services that enable companies to instantly move between servers, getting their data and conducting operations on another system when their main system is unavailable or compromised.”
System replication is far more than just a backup, explained Kedem. “Copying data from one drive to another just preserves the data you copied, but ensuring you have the computing resources to use that data is something else entirely. Systems today are very complicated, with many programs and resources running at the same time. It’s not enough just to save the data: You have to save the context that data is going to be used in.”…
The article continues at The Times of Israel.
