McDATA Corp., a leading provider of storage networking solutions, announced Los Angeles' Department of Water and Power, the largest city-owned public utility in the U.S., deployed six McDATA UltraNet Storage Director-eXtended (USD-X) WAN extension products to seamlessly direct traffic between its main data center and a mirrored disaster recovery site almost 20 mi away.
"Our public utility services support more than two million customers in the sixth largest economy in the world. It was imperative we had a reliable plan to not only protect our data in case of a disaster, but to get our systems back up and running immediately," said Ed Abbott, information operations manager, Los Angeles Department of Water and Power. "The McDATA USD-X gave us the ability to deploy our disaster recovery site outside the earthquake danger zone, eliminating the possibility of an earthquake taking out both data centers. On top of keeping the city hospitable, we are able to keep our own IT systems up and running, preventing lost billing and revenue."
For a public utility with $2.7 billion in annual revenue, one day of lost billing can result in almost a half-million dollars lost in interest. The synchronously mirrored disaster recovery site allows the Los Angeles Department of Water and Power to restore operations in less than an hour in case the main data center is rendered inoperable in a disaster. The built-in redundancy of the McDATA USD-X ensures the availability of all the department's diverse IT systems - where a potential loss of any of these services can cost the utility hundreds of thousands of dollars a day in lost revenue.
"Only McDATA's WAN extension products can provide the required director-class connectivity speed and availability over the wide area network," said Doug Ingraham, vice president of product management, McDATA. "Working with IBM, we were able to connect a disaster recovery site almost 20 mi away while ensuring full redundancy. The Los Angeles Department of Water and Power can have confidence in the robustness of their USD-X solution."
Source: McDATA Corp.
