On Thu, Jun 17, 2010 at 6:52 AM, James Smith <james@jamesstewartsmith.com> wrote:
we're in the process of building a DR site.
Assume for purposes of discussion that all the vendors have equivalent quality equipment with approximately equivalent features. I can think of four occasions you'd need a DR center 1 - Practicing your disaster-recovery drills 2 - Testing out new configurations or equipment that you'll roll out to the main system 3 - When you're having a really bad day and need to switch over quickly 4 - When you're having a really really bad day due to common-mode failures of your main-system's vendor's equipment. Case 1 is fine. Case 2 may let you do proofs of concept, but if the DR isn't a close enough model of your real equipment, it's often not good enough Case 3 is the canonical time that you want your DR center to look as much like the real thing as possible, especially if you're trying to handle partial failures of the main system and not just smoking-hole-in-the-ground disasters. Case 4 is the canonical time you wish you'd ignored my advice for Cases 2 and 3, because your HP box has different bugs than your Cisco box. Depending on quite what you do and what your failure models are, you may be able to build parts of your DR center using other vendors' equipment, without too much risk of mismatched configurations, but in general you're going to need to buy a lot of parts for your DR center that are identical to the primary systems they're backing up. -- ---- Thanks; Bill Note that this isn't my regular email account - It's still experimental so far. And Google probably logs and indexes everything you send it.