Our "campus" as such consists of 4 buildings in three locations. Our main plant has two buildings, one up the hill from the main plant, which is connected via gigabit fiber. That's where I planned to put the "primary" appliance. We do not have Fibre Channel infrastructure, so any appliance would be running as an IP SAN, not a Fibre Channel SAN. Our "computer room," such as it is, consists of my office. J There really is not any room in my office for any more computer equipment.
My "D/R" site is likely to be our plant about 30 miles away, connected to the internet by a 5 Mbit Metro Ethernet connection (at the main plant, we have a 2 Mbit Metro-E connection, but that can be increased with a phone call.) I don't think that the connection is fast enough to do a "real time" replication, but an async replication should be doable (every 15 or 30 minutes replicate changes only) from what everyone has told me. My other thought was to see if our ISP would offer us Co-Lo space for a D/R SAN. John-AldrichTile-Tools From: Erik Goldoff [mailto:[email protected]] Sent: Tuesday, April 06, 2010 10:51 AM To: NT System Admin Issues Subject: Re: SAN question I'm not familiar with your 'campus' setup, do you have a separate location from your servers, within fiber distance, that can be outfitted with UPS and A/C ? I've seen some cases where a fiber run connects either two buildings, or different ends of the building where all but the most catastrophic events could only affect one or the other storage sets. You could even run a disk-2-disk backup across the fiber to the secondary SAN, and then run a tape backup of *that* for any off site archival and rotations All depends on your needs and budget for a colo or hot site, depending on your data size the connection bandwidth could be the cost issue On Tue, Apr 6, 2010 at 10:36 AM, Kevin Lundy <[email protected]> wrote: John - have you completed a business impact analysis? Derived RTO and RPO? I think that will go a long way towards helping define technical options as well as the finances. To try to design the technology first, in my opinion, is putting the proverbial horse before the cart. Kevin On Tue, Apr 6, 2010 at 10:28 AM, John Aldrich <[email protected]> wrote: No, I have not narrowed it down. I initially hoped to get the project done this year, but the economic downturn has hurt our cash flow such that we are in a "holding pattern" on any "discretionary" spending and the SAN project certainly falls into that category. You bring up a good point about what happens if you only have one SAN and it goes down. That's one reason I was thinking about having a "D/R" SAN at a remote location. We do have a remote location about 30 minutes away. Another option would be to co-lo the D/R SAN with someone. I just got off the phone with a Global Crossing rep who wanted to talk to me about things they could do for me, especially in the way of conferencing, etc. We got to talking about the IT priorities for the next couple years and I mentioned the SAN project and asked if they provided online backup services. She said that the only thing they could offer would be co-lo space and that got me to thinking that maybe that might be the best of both worlds. co-lo the D/R SAN at a professional co-lo facility. John-AldrichTile-Tools 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/> ~
<<image001.jpg>>
<<image002.jpg>>
