DR Solutions

[Xaneth]

I wanted to open up a question to the community about how you are using VBR in your organization, and how you are performing offsite replication and business continuity. We are currently using VBR in our production environment and are running daily incremental backups (last 21 days) and hourly replication (last 7 hours). So local DR is pretty much handled.

We are looking to move our backups and/or replication offsite now. I'm kind of in the dark about vendors to consider, so I've taken a look at a couple right now, Terremark, based in Florida, and viaWest based in Dallas, TX. I don't have a budget for a third server, we are currently running VMWare Essentials, and VBR Essentials on two physical servers, and have room for one more. What I'm looking to do is save the up front $$ on another server (10 to 15K), and "rent" a dedicated server at one of these hot sites. I'm seeing recurring costs of around $2000/mo from what I'm being told, ballpark. What are others doing, how can I save some cost? Will it be better to suck it up and eat the cost of another server and just co-locate?

I was also informed that setting up a Veeam server instance at the hot site along with Enterprise Manager and configuring the replications as "pulls" rather than backup "push", as it's more optimized. What is the best way to configure this?

[Xaneth]

No one is doing this? Seriously? How do I doubt that?

[Gostev]

Terremark has existing customers doing this (replication with Veeam to Terremark hosted ESX). I've met with Terremark couple of weeks ago during VMware PEX in Orlando specifically to talk about what they are doing today, some possible futures, and what do they need from us. So, going with Terremark is definitely a good choice, and great investment for future because we are going to continue enhancing this solution's capabilities. Thanks!