Replication for Disaster Recovery in Virtualized storage environment

[host33]

Hi,

I am trying to create a DR environment at a 2nd site. My issue is that I need to be able to come up with a cost effective solution to replicate my VMs, and data from one type of SAN to a different manufacturer's SAN. Today, we have an Equalogic iSCSI SAN and would like to replicate to a Dell iSCSI SAN. In the future though, we might have other SANs in our production environment that needs to replicate to our Dell iSCSI SAN in our DR environment? Does anyone know cost effective software that will replicate across different types of manufacturers of SANs in a virtualized environment?

Thanks for helping.

[ctfoster]

DataCore have a product suite that addresses this market area - specifically with respect to xvendor replication.

Obviously, quite what you mean by cost-effective is open to interpretation. If you are looking at asyncronous syncronisation where the business is only a couple of minutes behind at the remote site, thats going to be more expensive than a solution that simply restores a delta set across the link at periodic intervals.

[host33]

Perfect, thanks. I am going to evaluate them and InMage for capabilities and pricing. Maybe FalconStor, but I don't think they will fit into my "cost-effective" requirement.

[ctfoster]

If you are looking for a 'cost effective' solution you could look at esXpress. I use it to run simple delta based backup replication that keeps a set of 'ready to run' VM's 12 hours behind production on local disc. I know that they are bringing out a new product based in true incremental block backup sets that could be moved across a WAN every couple of hours or so.

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[azn2kew]

There are literally many solutions you can get but like you've interested in budget constraint, if you want to use esXpress is great even with free version you can do pretty much what you expected. SANMelody and Data Domain products will do it without any problems but ties to license fees. I've suggest use esXpress for now since its FREE.

Regards,

Stefan Nguyen

"The Power of Knowledge"

[petedr]

Thanks Stefan for mentioning esXpress.

But I do want to clarify, yes you can do Full VM backups with the esXpress Free version but for doing Simple Replication and our soon to be released Advanced Replication it does require a licensed version.

Pete@esXpress

[bdseeley]

I agree, esXpress is a great solution. I purchased licenses for this product for the company I was with recently and it's a fantastic way to go, you're even able to backup VMs in their live state with full, delta and file level solutions. Definitely recommended.