Hitachi, Ltd., Hitachi Vantara and NTT DOCOMO BUSINESS, Inc. announced that they had confirmed automated recovery using actual equipment between data centers more than 600 km apart in the event of a disaster. Operations resumed approximately 10 minutes after the failure was detected.
Hitachi, Ltd., Hitachi Vantara and NTT DOCOMO BUSINESS, Inc. conducted a demonstration of automatically recovering an entire environment, including applications, in the event of a disaster over a communications network spanning approximately 600 km between Tokyo and Osaka. When a failure occurred, the system automatically switched to a secondary site and proceeded with recovery, including starting the operating system and database, achieving resumption of operations in approximately 10 minutes.
The demonstration environment combined Hitachi's Hitachi Virtual Storage Platform One Block storage system with Red Hat OpenShift Virtualization and used a long-distance data integration solution called Borderless Data Share (BDS). Data was synchronized in real time, enabling recovery while maintaining data consistency across the distance of 600 km.
The results demonstrate the feasibility of real-time integration of container applications between remote locations and the operational use of standby resources in production as a disaster recovery measure. The companies will consider expanding the solution's application to mission-critical areas, including the financial sector.
They also aim to implement workload shifting, which changes the location where processing takes place according to power availability during normal operations and data center operating conditions. Strengthening cyber-resilience capabilities and expanding real-time data synchronization are expected to be future challenges.