greggap
Contributor
Contributor

DR plan assistance, vreplicator, data domain etc

Hi All,

I need some help with a DR plan. We currently have a third party data center with 4 esx hosts, about 70 vms, we have 7 branch offices throughout the US, each connected

by a 1.5 mpls line. Each branch offices has a ESX box running 3-4 vms, about 300-800gb of data per branch office. We currently use Acronis for backup at each branch

office, which quite frankly sucks. We are building a DR site nearby the office we work at, the first priority is to be able to replicate backups from the remote branch

offices. In the future this DR site will replace our outsourced data center and at that time we will build a new DR site and purchase an additional SAN to

mirror from the DR site to the Datacenter. Currently in the branch office we backup to small nas devices via an isolated gig connection.

I have looked a Data domain and exagrid, but they appear to be way out of our price range, the lowest cost device is 12k. These remote

offices have 20-70 people in them, can't justify 12k per office. My main concern is our low bandwidth and being able to transfer

the data at night. We have also looked at vreplicator/vranger combo and possibly seeding our first backup and then

continuing a nightly hybrid backup. Our branch offices do not have exchange servers, sql etc so a nightly replication

would likely be 500-1000mb over the 1.5 line. I'm wondering how reliable this is, how big the snapshots will grow, concerned

with the technology of leaving snapshots open all the time, etc.

Any recommendations would be great.

Thanks,

Greg

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