Complete DR Solution

Spammeh · 29 May 2013 at 13:41

So I've been tasked with completely revamping our DR system at work and if I'm honest its a bit of a mess. Currently have the following at my disposal

HEAD OFFICE
Backup Exec 11d... :rolleyes:

LTO3 tape drive
LTO4 tape drive

COLOCATION
2x ESXi 5.0 hosts with 32GB RAM each
QNAP TS-1279U-RP (10GB RAM after RAID5)
Connected to head office via 10MB IPVPN

What I'm trying to achieve is a 3-pronged backup / high availability solution with the following

Disk-2-Disk Array for quick restore
Large LTO tape autoloader
high availability across the IPVPN link

Correct me if I'm wrong, but this will allow me to have long term snapshots of the data (using tape), quick restore snapshots (via disk array) and high availability across the 10MB IPVPN at our Colo in case of major failure.

Hope all the above makes sense up to now...

The budget is £40k for this project, and as far as I can see I need to buy the following:

LTO autoloader
Rackmount backup server
Disk array with masses of cheap storage
Backup software (vsphere and physical) that also provides a high-availability option
2x replacement ESXi hosts for the Colocation

A majority of our data is on virtual servers (sitting on an IBM v7000 SAN), however we do have a number of physical servers, and servers hosted at remote sites.

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As you can imagine, this could be quite a challenge, as we have (in an ideal world) around 10TB of data to backup. As it stands, most things aren't backed up that should be - and that makes me worry.

Question is, does anyone else run a similar solution at their place? What disk arrays are you using? What software do you use?

I'm not after a definitive answer, or for you guys to do my job, but its good to get like-minded individual's opinions on what they have used, etc.

Spammeh · 29 May 2013 at 16:59

rotor said:
Not sure if I fully understood the situation, but you're going to struggle with 10 Mbps (an absolute maximum of 108 GB/day). What are you copying/replicating to the remote site?

http://web.forret.com/tools/bandwidth.asp?speed=10&unit=Mbps

We're not going to replicating all of the 10TB over that line to the Colocation. 108GB a day would be plenty, as there isn't 108GB's worth of change on a daily basis.

Spammeh · 29 May 2013 at 17:01

randal said:
Are you planning on using Vmotion or anything like that for your ESX hosts?

We do have vmotion across a majority of our virtual environment

Spammeh · 30 May 2013 at 09:04

Yes, we'll try and do a failover test on a quarterly basis I think. Why wouldnt you mix backup and DR? A lot of the big backup software offers them together, and surely that is logical, as they use similar technologies to get the end product?

Spammeh · 30 May 2013 at 11:55

Guys, I won't be backing up 10TB over to our remote site. The systems that will be replicated are far smaller than 10TB and have been identified by the business as business critical. Yes, the initial replication will be painful, however that could be mitigated by taking the initial backups physically over to the Colocation. The total amount of data to be replicated to our Colocation would be approx 3TB, with the daily data change being between 20 and 35GB.

@rotor, I know DR and backups are totally different methodologies, one is a snapshot at a given time, and DR (close to realtime) requires a live mirror of current data. However, as far as looking at technologies and software that can provide these for the business are often bundled together and can utilise similar technologies to achieve this.

@Richard_Smith I've looked at Veeam and yes it would allow me to a majority of what I need to do, but it deals with Virtual only, and i have physical servers which are too precious to simple ignore when it comes to this.

Spammeh · 31 May 2013 at 16:28

Ive been looking at Unitrends recently. Looks a fantastic little product - seems to cover off most things from a software perspective - anyone used it?