Spec me a disaster recovery solution

citizenx13

citizenx13

citizenx13

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Joined
23 Jun 2010
Posts
719
Hello

I got a new fun task today to look into a better provider for our small companies backup/disaster recovery solution and rightfully so .
At the moment from what I understand we have a three layer provider which in my view is quite silly, we have a “reseller” that sold our company a product through a provider that provided a solution that I understand they have to outsource to support, so as you can imagine is a pain if something goes wrong as our IT administrators get bounced around continuously and resolutions take ages and don’t last wrong.

So I have been tasked in trying to find a better solution I will be researching after I finish this post but as you know first-hand experience is better than reading websites so I thought why not ask the Wizards at OCUK is there anyone that could recommend a provider they had experience with and perhaps advise who to stay clear from.

We have about 800 Gig of data across eight servers we would need to backup offsite, automatically and reliably, decent customer service and support .

Site is in London UK.

If anyone could advise I would greatly appreciate it and investigate further.
Any questions post them at will.

Best wishes
 
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I don't use any of these services, but seeing that you haven't had many responses, here's what I know:

Rackspace - Are a well respected if pricey web hosting company, and they are likely to be able to provide a managed offsite backup solution.

CrashPlan.com - US company with a good website explaining the company, probably worth a closer look.

Mozy - UK databackup company, similar to CrashPlan. Might be worth considering if a UK company is important to you.

Rgds
 
Crashplan actually have a UK base for their business service (the free one is US only).

I'm currently looking into using Crashplan as an offsite backup service, but the volume of data we have, along with our network speed, is causing issues :(
 
Backup is not Disaster Recovery.

Just once more so it is fully appreciated:

Backup is not Disaster Recovery!

Do you need offsite backup only or Disaster Recovery options also? This will greatly affect what solution you need.
 
Let us know what the business requirements are:
Are you simply looking for Backup, which means there data is "somewhere else", or Disaster Recovery?

You need to consider the following:

How much data loss can the business tolerate? In the case of a disaster, can you live with having lost 5 minutes-worth of data? 10 minutes? 15 minutes? or perhaps just a few seconds? The answer to this will determine whether frequent backups will suffice, or whether you need continuous replication. In the latter case, your data is continually copied to the standby servers which may or may not be at a separate site.

Once you've decided that, you need to consider the time to recover. Once a disaster has bene identified, how quickly do you need to get the applications back up and running and accessible to the users? This may vary across the various applications. If a few hours is OK, then some of the basic solutions may be what you need. On the other hand, if you are talking about an e-commerce website and associated databases for example then five minutes can be too long, so you need to look at High Availability solutions.

In order to define the budget for your chosen solution, consider the cost to the business if the applications are not available, including lost sales, staff costs, etc. Also remember that a disaster doesn't just mean the unlikely scenario of the office burning down, but the more typical blue-screens, or the cleaner unplugging the server to do the hoovering, and so on!
 
Guys thank you very much for all the replies, all of them make very good sense and I have more clear understanding and good questions to ask in our meeting.

I have been looking at our current setup (trying to fix it) and as far as I understand all we have is live offline replication for eight of our server (data and exchange).

I cannot provide more info as I am not 100% on everything but you guys have been great in helping me understand and know what questions to ask.

Thank you again for your time and I will be updating this thread when I know more :)

kind regards
 
We use Symantec backup exec, personally I can't recommend it to anyone. We've been through a few versions now and frankly it's not improving. Netbackup however is more flexible and reliable.
 
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