DR Site planning - design using Backup Exec

[Amer_VS]

Hi everybody,

Anyone can recommend any reading, guidelines about planning / designing a Disaster Recovery Site using Backup Exec?

I am considering to have a second backup server on the secondary site and moving tapes there when a restore is needed. Catalog replication or tape imports may do the trick, but there is have to be a better approach. Any ideas?

thank you in advance,

Amer.

[ZeRoC00L]

We miss a lot of information to answer your questions correctly.

* How many servers are we talking about ?

* What is required the RTO ?

* What is required the RPO ?

* What is your budget ?

[Hywel_Mallett]

I have never seen any documents about DR that are specific to Backup Exec.

You obviously already have an idea in your head about what you want to do. Your idea of having a second Backup Exec server on a secondary site is an acceptable one, however I'd say don't think about moving the tapes there when you have a disaster - you need to move them off-site before you have your disaster!

Replicating catalogs is something that theoretically should work, and I have proposed to have in Backup Exec before (years ago!), but it's not an official method of operation for Backup Exec, so I doubt Symantec would support it.

Tape imports and catalogs may be alright for you if you can accept the time it takes to do them (I assume you wouldn't catalog each tape as it went off-site). I assume you're talking about a timescale in the region of days to recover from a disaster. If you wanted shorter timescales, I'd be thinking more along the lines of high availability (clustering) and/or replication.

[pkh]

You would definitely want to read the Preparing for Disaster Recovery section of the Admin Guide.  Also, you might want to familiarise yourself with the IDR (Intelligent Disaster Recovery) section.  IDR will definitely speed up the recovery.

[Amer_VS]

Thank everybody for your advice.