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Story URL: http://hardware.silicon.com/servers/0,39024647,11036156,00.htm

Sun unveils bomb, flood and fire proof servers
No mention of earthquakes from the Californian firm...

By Michael Kanellos

Published: Tuesday 29 October 2002

Sun Microsystems has come up with a way to insulate computer networks from fires, floods and bomb attacks: Split up the machines and put them in different cities.

The server giant will today unveil its Enterprise Continuity program, a collection of services and technologies designed to prevent network failure by physically separating computers working together in a unified cluster.

Properly installed, computers in the same cluster - running, for example, a stock trading system or conducting drug research - could be located 125 miles away from each other without increasing latency or lag time. Current fibre connections only allow computers in a cluster to be separated by six miles. Beyond that distance these computers can't function seamlessly to run the same application together.

Chris Wood, director of technology sales and marketing in Sun's storage division, said: "This allows you to pick up half your cluster and get it out of the disaster footprint. You want to move from disaster recovery to 'didn't stop in the first place'."

Nortel Networks participated in the project and will assist Sun in implementing installations.

To date, companies have mostly hired disaster recovery firms to perform data retrieval or create systems that mirror ongoing operations to prevent downtime. Some companies have tried services similar to the one that Sun is selling as well.

Although not cheap, Enterprise Continuity will be less expensive compared with many traditional disaster recovery options because the active computer systems and the backup systems are the same thing. If an explosion knocks out half the cluster, the remaining half will absorb the work.

The system depends largely on an artifact of the dot-com era: dark fiber. In the late 1990s, companies planted miles of fiber-optic cable into the ground in Europe and North America. A substantial portion of it has yet to be used.

Michael Kanellos writes for News.com