We have a Clariion CX4-120 for our production storage unit. For what it's worth we have a hybrid of fiber and iSCSI connections. In our secondary data center we have a VNX. The secondary data center is to be used as a failover only and no live connections will occur.We are connected with an MPLS with 30Mgs.

Our stategy for replication is multi tiered.

Our primary application is a healthcare, EMR app called Epic. Replication for Epic uses host based shadwing/journaling.

We also have a dedup box similar to Data Domain called Exagrid that we use for data with a long RPO and RTO.

Other than that we have 5 servers that we need to replicate as close to real time as possible. They are all Windows based and 3 of these servers have iSCSI connections to our Clariion.  For these apps we decided to use DoubleTake (now called something else). One of the reasons for this is that we felt we could throttle the bandwith better than EMC SAN copy and it has failover and failback wizards.

Now that we have Double Take insatlled we found that the only way to copy the servers with attached storage is to allow Double Take to create a vmdk for each LUN. So our file server, for example, has a 70 GB OS and LUNs of 800 GB, 400 GB and 300 GB. The Double Take appliance at the secondary site (the manager on the destination side) is a VM which will create a vmdk for the file server and each LUN will be turned into vmdk's all within the VMFS storage (obviously). the problem with this is that the failback will no longer be wizard driven and we will have to do file restores for each lun back to our Clariion. This is not what was told to us on our technical sales calls with Double Take. It also seems rediculous to me that they don'e have a solution for attached storage since that must be what 90% of shops use.

For a side note I am waiting for a call back for DT as the tech that ran our demo is no longer working there, but that's another story.

My questions are;

What do you think are good strategies for Replication of Windows servers, all VMs as of today, between teh CX and VNX?

Are you using a combination of EMC licenses and 3rd party software for your replication?

Do you have any experience with Double Take and is it possible the sales demo was right and the 2 support techs were wrong about the method of protecting attached storage?

One last thing, I did spec out different solutions including EMC licensing, VM products and VRanager but this was over a year ago and it seems things have changed.

Thanks in advance