Post your thoughts regarding this question

[Avinash Kumar]

I have a customer who bought

 

Two XP Array : One for the primary site & the second for the DR site. The luns are presented from both the storages to the HPUX machines and doing a host based mirroring. My customer is into Telecom business so bandwidth is not an issues (Its about 16GB of intersite bandwidth)

 

Now we have following hardwares procured for the backup and secondary DR.

 

a. An ESL library with 700 slots - (Bigger One)
b. An EML library with 400 slots - (Smaller One)
c. A VSL with some TBs of space - (Disk Staging Unit for the backup.)

 

Please bear in mind that the bandwidth is not an issue at all, meaning the primary site backup can be taken at the library located at the DR site over this bandwidth.

 

How would you place the libraries in primary & dr site ?

[Ganesan Sudalai]

The ideal and Best performance option would be taking the backup in the remote site

either by breaking this mirror copies for backup, in case if this is not possible make a Shadow image or Business copy of the same and mount it in the remote side and Back it up. So this also helps in a way that your production computing environment is in primary site and Backup is in DR site. Later you may do a duplication and send the 2nd copy to some other place and vault it.

 

This is how it goes functionally :). Now you look at the way, how do you accomplish this technically. By the way, somebody should have designed something while ordering this Libraries. You may put across that thoughts and we can evaluate that particular stuff.

 

~ Dr. Napoleon Hill

http://poigaiblog.blogspot.com/

[varadharaj tamilvanan]

Can you provide the full Hardware and software Details of the Entire Setup so that we can plan for an optimized solution.

[Avinash Kumar]

This is what I have in mind, lets debateeee

 

The first step is to decide which site is going to be the primary backup site. In other words... if you plan on backing up the primary data site and then sending the tapes to the DR site, or a copy of the tapes... AND you are not worried about bandwidth, then suggest your DR site be the primary "backup" site.

With that said, the ESL should go there with the EML in the primary data site ( the secondary "backup" site).

The VSL could be in either site, but to facilitate quicker D2D, i wold have the VSL in the secondary "backup" site so then the VSL is the only device talking to the ESL, assuming you going to do the majority of your backup's via the VSL.

With the main Tape library already in your DR site, you do not have to worry about tape transportation AND with a second library, you could always do T2T copies outside of your backup window to have backups in both locations where/when needed.

Kind regards...Avinash
 

[Jay]

My suggestion would be to have 2 VSLs

 

One at the primary performing D2D and then the VSL on it's own should replicate the backed up data to the DR/Secondary site to the 2nd VSL and then if required for compliance or other standard Copy/duplicate data to tape at the DR site and take those those tape to another offsite location.

 

But a even better way, would be to have the 2nd VSL at a secondary site (NOT the DR site) and take tape to a 4th location.

 

Netapp has this replication functionality from VTL to VTL

 

So you would have primary backups on VSL at Primary site, then HOST based replication to DR site, VSL based replication to 3rd site and tape vaulting to the 4th site. theyby providing for 4 layers of protection and absolute compliance with standards...if any.

 

Having said that, now that the customer has already done the purchasing. a Combination of what Ganesan & u have in mind should work fine.

 

Cheers...Jayanth