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Using replication over a WAN?

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We have Acronis 7 - love the product - I've been testing out the replication on a simulated 'site a' & 'site b' (where site b is a fail-over hot site in another state) and wondering if this idea is even feasible. It would be for some pretty application intensive processes (Oracle, Exchange, Active Directory) etc. The replication does what I need on the simulated setup but that's over a LAN link so actually going over a WAN is my question. Does anybody have any experience with this setup? Is it supported by Acronis? or is the $12,000 alternative really the best way to go..???

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You must be the judge when asking if its feasible.
As far as if its supported by Acronis, thats irrevelant. The software does not care about what it goes thru to reach a datastore or its backup location.
This is where good network design and best practices come into the equation.

The bigest problem you will most likley face in this scenario is the time which it will take for the data to be sent to the remote location.
You do mention site B is a hot failover, so you must have a decent connection in place at the moment. What type of connectivity is between sites?
Just remember about man in the middle packet sniffing if the backup is not encrypted. Traversing a public network with sensitive information and not using a secure tunnel such as IPSec is bad. Even IPSec has its cons.
Most hot failover sites I have worked with are connected by private ethernet. Not sure about your situation.

Im my oppinion backup sets and their data path should always remain secure. Always.

Most sites I admin have a typical upload is 1MBPS. We can only get GPON or symmetrical ethernet in the CBD which isnt all that big geographicaly and needless to say its expensive. Other countries are different obviously.

To solve this in my case I have installed a P2P microwave link which enables me to get everything offsite to another office, and vice versa fast and
secure.
There are pros and cons with this, as licence fees and initial hardware costs can be high.

Another site I admin everything is put onto removable HDD bays and swapped out daily and rotated between offsite and onsite fireproof datasafe storage. It is also duplicated to a seperate storage device. This is a small site, and works great with a relible backup operator.

Good luck in your setup.

i am replicating some offices that have esx servers running with a few 100 gigz of vm's i controled the outbound speed with a vmware portgroup egress filtering. for me as test this is running at acceptible speeds and if there was not much changes the jobs finish sometimes in 10 minutes ;)

just is just backup.. running the vms in the other datacenter is a totally different ballgame. then you network should dynamicly route subnets to the other side ;)

We've scrapped the idea of using acronis over the WAN - we're going with VMware's SRM solution. It's a better overall fit.

IT Manager wrote:

We've scrapped the idea of using acronis over the WAN - we're going with VMware's SRM solution. It's a better overall fit.

i think i must agree, while vmprotect is stil growing in this part, it is not a fully Site recovery manager with managing the network site on a recovery