Disaster recovery (DR) plans are becoming a key part of a company's overall IT planning process to ensure continuous availability of the company's critical infrastructure at all times. A major component of these plans involves protecting business-critical data through backups and data replication. Such replication and backup processes may occur between data centers, branch and home offices, or primary and backup sites.

A successful business continuity/DR plan has two key components at its core: a solid replication product to manage replication processes, and an effective and efficient Wide Area Network (WAN) that enables those processes to be accomplished successfully.

Two of the critical metrics used in measuring the success of a disaster recovery plan are recovery point objectives (RPO) and recovery time objectives (RTO). These two metrics measure the amount of data lost during a disaster and the time required to restore to normal operations.

One of the most common barriers to the effective deployment of any high-performance data replication solution is the performance of the solution over the WAN between the DR sites. Storage teams, when sizing the bandwidth requirements, often find that their initial sizing estimates are insufficient to meet the performance requirements of a DR solution. In practice, true WAN performance is rarely given much thought until the organization ramps up their production replication system and realizes that the WAN bandwidth they have does not provide the expected throughput. Suddenly, the RPOs and RTOs they expected to meet are no longer realistic.