Hello,
I am in the middle of doing a proposal for a local company here. I have not had any experience with data replication or disaster recovery and have had to do a ton of research.
I have come here to post what I have found out and hope for any helpful hints or suggestions. First off the solution will need to work for 30+ server applications and at least 3 SQL database servers with about 3TB of data between them all. Most of these systems are critical and can not afford much if any downtime. At this stage I just need to narrow it down to 3-4 possible solutions. Then I need to do the research one those solutions. i.e. What each system does, the pros and cons of each system and the cost if the system vs. the cost of downtime.
I am thinking I may do a combination of solutions that will work together for form one Business Continuity system.
First off for the application servers I was looking at either VMWare ESX/GSX or Microsoft Virtual Server. This looks like a good solution because you can free up resources by merging the server applications that are not in heavy use and do not require to many resources. Plus it would allow for a short RTO if you can just restore a snapshot to get the application back. It looks like VMWare is more robust but I will research them both.
Does anyone know of anywhere there has been a head to head comparison done on these?
For the SQL servers I was thinking either a pure replication solution, like getting another SAN at another location and then using an application like VERITAS to replicate the data or getting a solution like NetApp offers and use their storage plus add the software they have for data snapshots and mirroring.
What I really would like to see for these are some of the cons to using them. I can go to the individual web site to see what it can do but finding what it can not do is tougher to find.
Thanks again for the help, sorry for the length of the post.
Jesse
I am in the middle of doing a proposal for a local company here. I have not had any experience with data replication or disaster recovery and have had to do a ton of research.
I have come here to post what I have found out and hope for any helpful hints or suggestions. First off the solution will need to work for 30+ server applications and at least 3 SQL database servers with about 3TB of data between them all. Most of these systems are critical and can not afford much if any downtime. At this stage I just need to narrow it down to 3-4 possible solutions. Then I need to do the research one those solutions. i.e. What each system does, the pros and cons of each system and the cost if the system vs. the cost of downtime.
I am thinking I may do a combination of solutions that will work together for form one Business Continuity system.
First off for the application servers I was looking at either VMWare ESX/GSX or Microsoft Virtual Server. This looks like a good solution because you can free up resources by merging the server applications that are not in heavy use and do not require to many resources. Plus it would allow for a short RTO if you can just restore a snapshot to get the application back. It looks like VMWare is more robust but I will research them both.
Does anyone know of anywhere there has been a head to head comparison done on these?
For the SQL servers I was thinking either a pure replication solution, like getting another SAN at another location and then using an application like VERITAS to replicate the data or getting a solution like NetApp offers and use their storage plus add the software they have for data snapshots and mirroring.
What I really would like to see for these are some of the cons to using them. I can go to the individual web site to see what it can do but finding what it can not do is tougher to find.
Thanks again for the help, sorry for the length of the post.
Jesse
