You don't say what OS(s) you need to replicate/backup. I'm going to speak from 
a UNIX perspective, since I'm a UNIX engineer.

On a per site basis:

Set up a box or boxes, which can accomodate enough disk space to meet your 
data storage needs. We'll call them, 'replication servers'.

On these replication servers, I would concatenate some disks to make one large 
partition, let's call it, /DR. Underneath /DR, I would have directories for 
each server that I was backing up.

Set up rsync jobs on your production machines to synchronize them over to your 
replication servers. Run them from cron periodically. Maybe use 'tar' to 
handle your boot disks and rsync to handle application data. 

Consider how you would handle any application that should be shut down prior 
to running rsync, ie, database.

What this solution doesn't take into consideration is retaining data for more 
than a 24 hour period. 

What you gain is:

- the ability to bring back a machine or parts of a machine, pretty quickly
- not much in terms of $$$
- easy to maintain
- DR testing is easy


HTH, 

--Steve




On Sunday 21 September 2003 09:22 am, Hart, Charles wrote:
> We are in a situation where we have to provide a backup solution for our
> Asia/PAC locations.  Essentially there will be one larger central; site so
> to speak then multiple (10-30) sites with 100-200GB per location.  We have
> looked at Veritas Netbackup, but fulls over 61-256K lines would be
> impossible, so Veritas's solutions is Volume Replicator?  Great idea, but @
> 64-128K lines the first full sync would take approx 4000 hours.
>
> We also have looked at many replication products, but all lacking a "Global
> Management" feature, other than EMC's On course but that's quite a pricey
> solution.  While we manage the same remote backups in the US using Tivoli
> Storage manager, we are being told the Veritas is our strategic direction
> regardless of technical limitations.
>
> If anyone could offer what their current solution is that would be great. 
> Single Local tape drives / small tabletop libraries and NBU installs are
> not an option for the sake of cost and lack of tape management.
>
> Thanks in advance!!!!!
>
> Charles Hart
>
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