To stay competitive in today's business climate, organizations must find ways to meet their business needs while controlling IT costs. IT departments face flat budgets and, at the same time, find that their organizations have become increasingly dependent on uninterrupted access to business-critical data.

In today's world, prudent IT administrators prepare to recover from two types of disasters as part of a complete Business Continuity and Availability (BC and A) plan. The first is a localized disaster, affecting a building or a small set of buildings. The second is a wide-area disaster, such as a hurricane or a regional power outage. Enterprises must replicate data to alternate data centers, located at a variety of distances from the primary data center, while maintaining acceptable data currency standards.

The HP StorageWorks 3 Data Center Replication (3DC) architecture technology provides data currency and consistency. This technology protects against both local and wide-area disasters by simultaneously supporting short-distance synchronous replication and long-distance asynchronous replication emanating from the same source volume. This paper provides details on the planning, configuration, and maintenance of a 3DC solution.