Backup vs. Replication Scheme?

[bunger]

I have searched and rethought my new Veeam implementation and am still unable to determine an appropriate path, so I am hoping the Veeam community might be able to lend some thoughts.

When is a "backup-based" strategy appropriate and when is a "replication-based" strategy appropriate? And what is the advantages/disadvantages of each?

Thanks in advance!
Bill

[jgremillion]

Here is what we do.

We have a DR site on the other side of Dallas. At this site we replicate everything over that we absolutely need to keep business up and running, in the fastest amount of time, in the case our data center gets totaled by a tornado or other disaster. For use that means e-mail servers and everything it takes to run such servers (POP/IMAP/SMTP, Groupwise Domain Server, Novell Directory tree for Groupwise, AD PDC, DNS, DHCP,VOIP Call manager servers, etc. And our student system which is a physicl server.). The servers that are VMs and don't exactly need to be synchronous replicas (SMTP/POP/IMAP, CAll Manager, Web Site, AD PDC) we replicate with Veeam.

The reason we replicate is so in a disaster we won't have to scramble to find tape backups of all our Veeam servers, restore the server then restore the VMs. The VMs are replicated in whole and are brought in a matter of minutes. As a side to replication, since we already have of site copies I don't backup as we can restore from a replicated copy if need be.

Everything else that is VMs we backup.

[Gostev]

Here is a quick summary.

Replication = low RTO.
Comes at a price of lower performance, and high storage usage (uncompressed images).
Target can only be another ESX(i) server (standby or production).

Backup = high RTO.
Provides better performance, and low storage usage (up to 10x less than replication due to compression and dedupe).
Target is any storage device, including tape (D2D2T).

[bunger]

Excellent info - that is exactly what I was looking for!