What all do I need to have??

[ssosw]

Hi,
Can you tell me what I need to do to have the NT servers back in action after a disaster like a fire or something.
One of my servers has mirrored hard disks and the other has Raid5 .
I can take the mirrored hard disk to a safe place,but I am not sure I can get the system up again with this disk.Please tell me how.
Also how can I take backup of the stripe set (w/p) on the other machine at a safe location in such a way that I can use it to get the system up and running in a day.
I have heard of using the Emergency repair disk but how and when is that usefull.Please help me.




Shanavas

 

[polymath5]

I don't think either of your ideas would be practical. If you have the mirror offsite, it's not a mirror anymore. Unless you know to take the drive right before the fire happens, it will be out of date. RAIDs are not intended for offsite data recovery, they're intended to help you when a drive fails, not when the sever melts!

Forget about the ERD, it is machine dependent, it's not designed to do what you want.

Ideal way would be to have offisite servers running something like NSI DoubleTake. We do this for our SQL server and a BDC

Next best way would be to have matching hardware offsite and use Veritas Disaster recovery. We use this on all our servers.

 

[ssosw]

Hi,

Thanks for the reply
Can you tell me about the veritas Disaster Recovery and how it works in short.We have a serverbased program which uses a SQL database.Will I be able to restore all this as it was and have the offsite server working as before.I hsve no idea so please explain.Thanks in advance

 

[polymath5]

For complete details on the Veritas IDR, you should check their site. Basically, it modifies the NT installation disks, and adds another to the set. It lets you do a total restore from tape, OS and everything. It's easy to install, and does work.

The offsite server should match the hardware of the onsite server pretty closely for the Veritas IDR to work. I know there can be some differences, but you would have to pay particular attention to SCSI drivers when you are creating the IDR disks. It will prompt you about using installed drivers or the drivers found on the NT Server CD. That's where it's nice to have matching hardware.

The DoubleTake software does a bit level mirror/replication. Hardware doesn't matter as long as the target has enough capacity to hold the data and CPU power to run as your temp backup.

You really should, if possible, bring in a consultant. Disaster recovery isn't something that you want to experiment with. Assuming you can get a consultant who knows what he's doing, it would be a good learning experience. Again it's not that hard, but it is mission critical.