Business continuity has historically been out of reach for small- and medium-sized businesses (SMBs) because it was too costly and complicated. While large companies could afford expensive fibre channel storage area networks (FC SANs), the highly trained staff to manage them, duplicate data centers, channel extenders, and expensive replication software, SMBs were restricted to making backup tapes and carting them to the storage administrator’s basement for safe keeping.

Today that has changed, and organizations of every size can affordably build an infrastructure that offers all levels of protection without exorbitant costs or specially trained staff. Advanced functionality that was first developed for mainframe environments has been improved over time, making it available to UNIX, Linux, and Windows environments. As a result, company size and platform selection no longer determine functionality level. This is due to multiple technological advances - in particular intelligent storage, iSCSI connectivity, server virtualization, and wide-area network (WAN) acceleration.

And it’s a good thing, because data is just as critical for SMBs as for large companies - and downtime can be much more damaging. This paper looks at how any company can create an affordable infrastructure that delivers the full spectrum of protection - from simple data protection to disaster recovery to business continuity.