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