Moreover, management wanted to use the same WAN link for video conferencing and VoIP. Increasing the bandwidth, says Geldart "would have been a very expensive proposition."

Cubist had already introduced virtualization, "so one of the benefits that we wanted to get was the ability to do a snapshot of these [virtualized] machines and replicate them to other sites," he says.

The company decided to move forward with a Riverbed Steelhead WAN optimization and application acceleration implementation. The major applications it needed to speed up over the link to Italy were Exchange 2003, Microsoft networking/CIFS, and for the disaster recovery link, FTP and NFS, says Geldart. With its own equipment in place at a third-party vendor's recovery site (out of state), backup and recovery time have been reduced dramatically. That's because the data is now replicated and sits on a live disk array, eliminating the need to restore from tape, which is one of the most time consuming parts of disaster recovery, says Geldart.

Tape is still useful, he adds, noting that it provides the ability to retrieve historical data and can also be a backup should replication fail.

Interestingly, deploying its own equipment at an offsite disaster recovery facility run by a third-party involved some struggle with that vendor. "The initial reaction [from the vendor] was a blank stare," says Geldart. But [the vendor] came around, and Geldart reports that "they are absolutely changing their model." (For security reasons, Cubist prefers to not reveal the name of the recovery site's vendor.)

Croy, the Forsythe consultant, agrees. Vendors in this arena, such as SunGard, are becoming more flexible and competitive, he says. However, he argues those companies still need to lower costs, become even more flexible and broaden the scope of offerings "to better meet business needs."

Backing up e-mail in case of disaster has been a costly and time-consuming problem for years, says Gartner's Scott. But now appliances are making it much easier to replicate Exchange and other major mail servers, she says.

Ken Adams, CIO of the Baltimore-based law firm of Miles & Stockbridge, says his company tried clustering Exchange servers, but found the strategy too complicated to engineer, requiring personnel to manage as well as hefty outlays for hardware and licensing. "We're a law firm, not a technology company," he says.

But the company's 600 or so e-mail accounts are considered mission-critical, so a solution was mandatory. Adams eventually turned to Teneros, which sells continuity appliances designed to replicate Exchange servers. The Teneros appliances are IP-based and easy to install at production and disaster recovery sites, says Adams.