Well, I think I have a pretty good handle on the meaning of the term SAN. Perhaps I should say "storage appliance." J What I was originally looking at doing was having two "storage appliances" (i.e. NetApp, Equallogic, etc box) at physically separate sites, with one replicating to the other. To me, that makes a lot of sense, but then it does nothing for long-term data protection. I do not like the idea of "host-based" replication, as that adds yet another layer of complexity and another point of failure.
After discussing it with the D/R consultant, he suggested a single appliance and a tape backup, which of course, would require a PC or something to attach to the SAN and back it up to tape or run a backup service. John-AldrichTile-Tools From: Mayo, Bill [mailto:[email protected]] Sent: Tuesday, April 06, 2010 10:27 AM To: NT System Admin Issues Subject: RE: SAN question I think the nomenclature makes things a little confusing. We had that problem around here, too, for quite a while after setting up a SAN (many folks still have a problem). I *think* you are using the term SAN to refer to a disk array. A SAN is like a LAN, MAN, or WAN. It is the network, not some particular thing that is attached to the network. If you have 2 disk arrays that are connected, you do not have "2 SANs", you have 1 SAN and 2 disk arrays. The SAN itself is comprised of the fibre channel switches and the things that connect to them (just like a LAN consists of switches/routers and the things that connect to them). This concept is important, as it makes it clearer why you would attach a tape drive through the SAN. By talking to your tape drive through the SAN, you remove the need for the tape drive to be in close physical proximity to your backup server. If you are able to have geographically separated data centers connected to the same SAN, this means that you can have your tape backup automatically "off site". The server doesn't know or care where the tape drive is, it just talks to it over the SAN. We are doing something like this. We have 2 data centers, and we have a disk array and a tape library in each. The data is on the disk array is replicated in real time to the secondary data center. Our backup system makes a copy of the backup to the secondary data center. We are able to do this because we have plenty of fiber between these 2 locations, and both our LAN/MAN and our SAN make use of this fiber. Bill Mayo _____ From: Martin Blackstone [mailto:[email protected]] Sent: Tuesday, April 06, 2010 10:14 AM To: NT System Admin Issues Subject: RE: SAN question If you are just backing up to tape and your SAN goes down, where will you restore too? Do you have a spare disk pool to use? If it was "me", I would be looking at a SAN solution that offers its own proven DR solution. Since I only know NetApp, they have a tool called SnapMirror that is built into the OS. You pay for the license and plug in the serial. Then setup your DR targets and let it rip. If your primary SAN goes down, you can do some clicks and bring the system online with all your data ready to access. But you seem to be talking about a lot of things you want. You want DR, you want clustering. If you cluster, maybe you only need to backup to tape. Unless you want to buy a clustered SAN and a DR SAN. Of course if you are going to have a DR SAN, I assume you have a DR location? I mean if the building burns to the ground do you have a location with the resources needed to keep the company running? Not just hold the data? Have you narrowed this down to 3 vendors yet? From: John Aldrich [mailto:[email protected]] Sent: Tuesday, April 06, 2010 6:52 AM To: NT System Admin Issues Subject: SAN question Guys, I'm still working on my storage needs, as the project I've been working on probably won't get approved until early next year at the earliest. I was talking to a D/R consultant recommended by one of the folks on this list. Unfortunately, he does not work with SMB clients, only large clients such as Coca Cola, etc. I had been thinking of getting two SANs and having one replicate to the other for D/R purposes. Most of our operations run off the AS/400 so that would not be much affected (except if we are able to some how back up to the SAN, which is unlikely with our current AS/400, due to disk space limitations on the 400) one way or the other by the SAN project. The aforementioned consultant suggested that we look into getting just one SAN and a tape backup for it or online backup service instead of doing two SANs. Most of the data on the Windows side of things would be hard to replace if it died, so while it's not "critical" to our operations, it's still highly important. What do you guys think of that suggestion? Would any of you guys do something like that? Why or why not? Also, anyone know any D/R consultants in the North Georgia area who work with SMB clients? John-AldrichTile-Tools ~ Finally, powerful endpoint security that ISN'T a resource hog! ~ ~ <http://www.sunbeltsoftware.com/Business/VIPRE-Enterprise/> ~
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