Last week I tweeted that I was in a meeting with Dell discussing EqualLogic's built-in disaster recovery while Amazon's high-profile EC2 and EBS outage was happening. At Core NAP, we have the ability to extend our customers business continuity plans by allowing them to replicate the data on their in-house EqualLogic array to ours.

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As an IT manager, this is a really exciting product. One of the biggest issues facing IT managers right now is business continuity. Traditionally, this has been done with tapes. Unfortunately, tapes have become a bit of a cost sink, in my opinion. They cost money to store and head count to administer the system that performs the backups. EqualLogic replication is built into the software that ships with every array and no additional licensing is required. Configuring the replication is fairly simplistic and runs on a schedule after that.

It's worth noting that this kind of replication performs better with a low latency connection to Core NAP's Austin data center. Even if your company cannot afford a direct connection to Core NAP, there are several products on the market designed to speed up EqualLogic replication across a WAN connection.