Using Containers for Disaster Recovery

We’re starting to see some interesting case studies for servers in shipping containers. In a profile of Revlon CTO David Giambruno, ComputerWorld has some details on Revlon’s use of distributed data center containers in its disaster recovery network. Here’s an excerpt:

“Rather than have parallel datacenters and SANs in various countries, Giambruno’s plan put high-capacity storage at five sites across the world, consolidating data and applications at its U.S. datacenter. Using the same shipping system as for its cosmetics manufacturing, Revlon sent out five pre-loaded “Mini Me” datacenter containers to its four other IT centers, creating a global disaster recovery network of identical systems that assured resources would work when moved. These Mini Me datacenters have the SAN, storage, and severs for both local operations and can support external fail-over from other locations if needed.

Revlon says this approach reduced its datacenter power consumption by 72 percent asnd cut disaster recovery costs in half, as well as dramatically reducing the time required to back up 6.5 terabytes of data each week. Read ComputerWorld for more.

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About Rich Miller

Rich Miller is the founder and editor-in-chief of Data Center Knowledge, and has been reporting on the data center sector since 2000. He has tracked the growing impact of high-density computing on the power and cooling of data centers, and the resulting push for improved energy efficiency in these facilities.