EV - writing to Centera across WAN

[goatboy]

Hi

Environment is EV9.0.2

I am interested in whether it's feasible to write to a Centera across a WAN.

e.g. Let's say I have an EV site in location A. Centera is located thousands of miles away, in location B. Lots of bandwidth, latency approx 200 ms.

The data written will be solely journal archiving, not mailbox archiving.

Volume will be 300 - 1000 users.

Is there anything in performance/best practice guides that can speak to whether this is feasible?

The downsides I can think of:

* Latency causing problems writing to Centera

* Slow exports from EV/CA/DA

Has anyone had experience with this scenario? Thanks!

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UPDATE April 2 2013 - did a proof of concept, all worked well, we got best rate of 15K per hour archiving across the WAN, as opposed to normal 25K rate for local archiving. No errors or issues (didn't test recalling via CA or DA, that would have likely been quite slow).

[JesusWept3 · Accepted solution]

Typically i've only seen that kind of a setup when you have replicas involved, so you have your primary on site and your replica off site....

It can be do-able, i guess it just depends on how big the pipe is between, whethere there is any expected down times to occur, and whether you're comfortable with all the extra bandwidth being used

What is your current storage used for EV?
And would you be doing an NTFS to Centera migration also?
And is it a centera or an atmos? what are the chances of the centera being replaced in the near future?

I guess the real question is, whats wrong with the storage you have now? what are the reasons for going to the centera? can it not be homed with the local ev servers etc?

But honestly, i doubt you'll see that big of an issue as long as your bandwidth is good and you have a fairly decent line between the both, but you are introducing another single point of failure in to the environment

[goatboy]

Much appreciated.

Current storage is Centera, there is no migration of old data needed at this stage.

Nothing wrong with current Centera storage. To clarify, this requirement is so data for certain users in Location A is stored in a different country (Location B).

So was thinking about creating a new vault store, with storage for that vault store being remote Centera in Location B. There is a secondary replica Centera in Location B, so DR replication is local to Location B.

The other option is a new EV site in Location B, but that is obviously a larger project than a new vault store.

[MMcCr]

Where is the source data that you will be archiving? Is that local in location B or is it also in location A? If its in location B, it wouldnt be ideal archiving over to EV servers in A with its storage in B.

As JW3 says, its all down to bandwidth but between countries it could also be impacted by latency depending on the country(s) involved source location etc.

[MMcCr]

Incidentally I've found this if you havent already seen it, fairly non-commital (the EV best practice also only mentions archiving etc over LAN and no mention of WAN).

http://www.emc.com/collateral/hardware/white-papers/h6790-symantec-enterprise-vault-centera-wp.pdf

[goatboy]

Source data is in location A (EV) with Centeras in location B. Round trip 200ms, latency 100ms. Plenty of bandwidth (e.g. 50Mbps) but not sure what will be devoted to EV due to QoS.

Thanks for the EMC doco, I had read it previously but as you said, doesn't mention this scenario.

I guess the only way to know if it works is to set up a pilot and try. Thanks for everyone's help.