Continuous backup / failover

[ben1234zz]

Hi

We have a client that has set his sights on a continuous backup/replication of SBS 2003 including Exchange to essentailly a hot spare.

Knowing SBS I am lothed to go this way, I am more include to using Acronis True Image and should the worst happen restoring to another machine.

However his mind is unchanged. Are there any third party products that provide replication and failover for SBS environments?

Thanks
B

 

[wahnula]

Sounds like a RAID 1 array will do everything the client wants: realtime replication to a hot spare. There are also RAID 1 controllers that can have a hot spare, a third drive that will insert itself into the array if one drive fails. If they are in a mobile rack, you can instantly yank one of the pair and have a full mirror of the drive at any given moment.

With RAID 1, at any time you can disconnect one drive and boot from the other. Look to 3Ware and Adaptec for add-in cards.

Tony

Users helping Users...

 

[ben1234zz]

Hi

Thanks for your post.

Sorry my explanation wasn’t very good, they have a RAID 5 array for data and RAID 1 for system.

They are concerned about natural disasters; fire, flood etc and require the replication off site to a hot spare server which can be brought onsite or to a spare office should the worst happen.

Thanks
B

 

[noveyron]

Is

http://www.databarracks.com/

more what you had in mind ?

 

[58sniper]

Your client is going to pay a bundle for that. Generally, a business that's using SBS is fairly small. Hot site DR failover can be very expensive. You have to take a lot of things into consideration. Not the least of which are natural disasters, but also man made disasters such as power grid failure.

It's easy to do most services, such as Domain Controllers, file servers, etc. But there is no native way of doing it with Exchange when you're already running Exchange - especially 2003. Exchange 2007 can do stretched clusters (nodes in different physical locations), but that's quite costly, and not easy for a small firm to afford - or administer.

You can look into man-in-the-middle filtering solutions which can queue mail and even provide access to send/receive should a site go down. But that doesn't address access to existing/archived mail.

A viable solution would be to outsource your app servers to a third party hosting solution. They provide the data center and host your servers, providing secure access to them, not really any different than when it's on premise. Many hosting providers can withstand many natural disasters to some degree, and often provide better stability than you can in your own office, including power, Internet access, etc.


Pat Richard
Microsoft Exchange MVP
Contributing author The Complete Reference: Microsoft Exchange Server 2007

 

[gavm99]

I still think you right to go down the True Image route, I would simply sit down with him and mention the prices above hopefully that will win him round!

Gavin Moorhouse

http://www.lucidcomputersolutions.co.uk

 

[wahnula]

I still think you right to go down the True Image route

...and with daily (or more often) imaged drive swaps and an off-site identical-hardware spare machine you should have all the contingencies covered. In a REAL emergency you could pull an OS drive and the data drives from the working machine, otherwise (a fire in off-hours) you will stand to lose a small amount of data.

Tony

Users helping Users...