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MMazurkiewicz
Contributor
Contributor

Hardware for a DR Environment

I've been spending the past few years developing and building/practicing working in a Disaster Recovery environment for my organization.  Recently we upgraded to vCenter 5.5 and my requirements for essential systems are ever changing, but one thing that I've quickly discovered is that I'm running out of disk space.  I was wondering what hardware others out there may be using for a *cheap* disaster recovery solution.

My disaster recovery requirements/plan are as follows:  I have a physical server with 2 64 bit Processors for a total of 16 cores, 24 GB of RAM, and 500 GB of local hard drive space.  The plan is to build a ESXI 5.5 server and recover to this environment.  The "limitation" that I currently have is my hard disk space.  An earlier iteration of this DR environment implemented a Lacie NAS which could be connected to by iSCSI, which would allow me to expand to an additional 2TB of disk space, which was more than enough... but I was unhappy with it in that I had a 5TB Lacie NAS which has since been re-purposed to other storage due to its inefficient use of space and I couldn't break the partition into smaller volumes as is deployed in my production environment.  By the way at that time I only had a ESX 4.1 environment, so if this limitation has changed I am not aware of it.

What I'm trying to find is recommendations for a NAS device that supports iSCSI, that can either be partitioned to 512 GB partitions, or that allow me to use the entire capacity of the storage device (if it is greater that 2TB).  I'm not brand loyal in this decision, I've only used Lacie in the past because of other colleague's familiarity with the product, but from my experience in this DR solution I don't think that it is a good fit since these devices seem to be self-contained systems that will only play nice with VMWare iSCSI after some convincing.

Thank you for any advice on this topic!

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