Suggestions for DR design

Hi there,

Firstly, while forums are a great way to sharing ideas, what I highly though is to engage an EMC Technology Consultant (TC) on what you plan to do. Its not very easy to suggest a solution which will definately work for you without knowing all the details of your data, lifecycle, change rates, SLAs, typical recovery requirements etc etc.

These guys are geared towards exactly that. To listen to what you have, and what you need from your desired solution, and what will work and what will not.

RecoverPoint seems a perfect match here...

Well, with RecoverPoint, you will need a second array on the DR side in order for RecoverPoint to replicate your data to.
Where you position your current backup solution needs to be discussed. There are a few factors involved in that decision to ensure the investment is maximised.

I suspect with your requirements and the link speed, it would stay at the production site.

You could use Recoverpoint as the enabler for off-host backups, ie no production footprint by using CLR (both local and remote replication of source volumes), you can achieve the following;

1) during continous replication, mount a VSS-consistent copy of your data to a mount host (a host dedicated to accepting replicas/bookmarks), which is connected to DL210 and Scalar TLU
2) Use a post-mount script to call your NW backups from that host.
3) With SQL, you can even attach** and recovery the database to the mount host and perform a SQL-level backup

All the while replication continues to both the local and DR site.
SLAs are improved and single-file level recovery is still available, as I suspect is why you use the DL for fileserver backups (frequent file-level recovery requests)

** when you unmount that image you attached, all changes are disgarded so you still have a recoverable copy of SQL!

You could possibly reduce tape usage for backups which have no legal or business requirement to be kept over an extended period of time (eg >30 days), example O/S drives, etc. I dont think removing tape is possible unless you expand the size of your DL to enable it to retain backups for longer periods of time.

To clarify, RecoverPoint provides point in time recoveries for medium-term, for example up to 30 (no hard limit), it should not be seen as a backup solution which can keep a copy of your data for months or years.

Again, its down to your business requirements and so I think you would find it very beneficial to start working with an EMC TC to map out whats best for you.

Any questions, dont hesitiate!
Cheers!
James.

Adding to James well thought out response .. agree with all his points.

To answer the question you had concerning arrays. With RP the arrays do not need to be the same, but Luns need to have the same size or larger. Performance characteristics of the luns should be based on empirical data (change rate), generally they should have as good or better performance characteristics as PROD. As James stated, an EMC TC can assist in helping you size and architect the solution.

oh!
And one more thing! Replication Manager would complement RecoverPoint very well in what you are trying to achieve through job automation, scheduling & reporting and reducing configuration times.

James.