Chinese technology giant Huawei launched its Active-Active Data Centre disaster recovery (DR) solution at the Huawei Cloud Congress, in Shanghai, China, last month.

The solution enables business continuity through active-active deployment round the clock, during disasters such as viruses, hacking or bugs.

The Huawei active-active deployment for application-level DR combines various technologies that include cloud computing, database and storage and has an active-active architecture for five layers of DR centres, namely storage, database, application, network and transmission.

All applications run on the active and backup data centres.

Huawei marketing and solutions president Patrick Zhang stated that everyone built a DR centre, but that it was rarely used, making it a redundant asset. Therefore, a solution was needed to make the backup data centre active.

“We don’t use the backup data centre often, so when a disaster occurs we need to be certain of its operational ability and that the service is consistent. Because we don’t have visibility into the backup data centre, we are afraid to cut over.

“Also, it sometimes takes too long and is too complicated to cut over. The longer the down-time, [the greater] the costs, especially for critical businesses that have zero tolerance for downtime, such as financial services and railways,” Zhang stated.

The Huawei active-active data centre manage-ment solution tracks performance and data consistency on the active and backup data centres and has virtualised systems that create a single management view.

Huawei’s FusionSphere cloud operating system allows information technology (IT) to virtualise both the active and backup data centres into one resource pool, so they can be managed as one data centre.

Further, all applications are active-active and run in the active and backup data centres. Therefore, if one data centre is interrupted, the applications and data continue to run in the other.

Huawei data centre DR solutions technical director Su Chung Yen said balanced business load and synchronised data input enabled the DR centre to provide services for daily business and share the load of the production system – therefore, increasing resource use.

“Once something goes wrong on one site, the other site can take over all business in real time, manage all existing IT resources and realise an application-level active-active seamless switch, with zero application interruption and no data loss. “Through the optimisation of storage and network technology, the delay of data trans-mission can be reduced,” he explained.

Global IT market intelligence and advisory services provider International Data Corporation domain research VP Avneesh Saxena noted that an increase in the number of customers using social and online platforms to engage with businesses had created a significant need for always-on data centres to keep businesses running.

Sashnee Moodley attended the HCC 2014, in China, as a guest of Huawei