As use of SharePoint has grown exponentially over the past six years across the US Military and Civilian Agencies, SharePoint has become increasingly mission critical. Many of these organizations have struggled to understand how best to ensure user access to that critical content during and after a crisis or outage. At the same time, users in these organizations require 'always on' SharePoint while IT seeks to conduct periodic perform maintenance on their environment without disrupting end user access. SharePoint is a unique application platform which requires a unique approach toward addressing COOP.

Syntergy's Replicator product provides an unique solution for COOP by offering a true "Active-Active" solution whereby multiple geo-dispersed instances of SharePoint containing common content are kept in synch in real-time. The dual benefit of this approach means that the COOP site for HQ could potentially be located at the HQ's largest secondary office location. Users at the second location can use their local farm to ensure rapid local access, while also addressing COOP between the two locations.

Active-Active real-time replication of content provides inherent redundancy that protects against data loss and corruption. Every time content is changed on any of the local servers, this content should be replicated to a contingency server. If a main server fails, you can substitute the contingency server, and operations continue uninterrupted. When the main server has been repaired or replaced, content can be replicated back to the main server, which can then be placed back into service.

Because agency operations move so quickly, it is critical that disaster recovery operations move equally quickly, to ensure that operations do not suffer, and that there is no impact on the underlying mission. Every minute that a local server or mission critical application is offline has a very real effect on the mission.

Agencies interested in backup plans and disaster recovery solutions will be very interested in the active-active approach. Should the central server become unavailable for any reason, real-time replication provides identical content. Since the other servers have the most current versions of content, an organization can continue business virtually unimpeded.

Summary - An active-active network topology contains at least two copies of mission-critical data. All files are synchronized so that if any server fails, users are routed to a surviving server. This strategy allows you to use disaster recovery resources live, during everyday business operations, proving daily that the strategy works, and that enterprise content is available when and where it is needed.

Syntergy is the only vendor that can provide real-time "application level" replication in SharePoint. This means that we can deliver 'always on' SharePoint whereby both farms are 'active-active' and able to support users on either or both sites with no downtime. You can perform maintenance on one Farm and 'cache' changes which will synch up the other side once maintenance is complete. Additionally, Syntergy allows you to replicate between different versions of SharePoint which facilitates ongoing operations during service pack installations.