Disaster Recovery Lan in a Bunker.

[ferg]

G'Day All,

Greetings and best wishes. I am trying to get clarification on this matter
and to wrap my brain around it:

In my main office lan I am rinning W2K3 servers, AD, Citrix/Term Srvr,
Exchange 2K3, File server.
In a DR Bunker I plan on having basically the same setup for DR so that, if
the office has to be shut down, users can connect to the bunker through
Citrix/Term Srvices. Exchange, SQL and the File server will be replicated
using DoubleTake.

QUESTION:
Given that power and services might be unavailable in the main office
building, thus no access to Active Directory for authentication, in setting
up the DR LAN in the bunker it appears best/safe/advisable to create a whole
new AD domain and configure the Main office to replicate its AD database
over to the bunker.

Correct?

Thanks much

 

[gao xiang]

test

 

[daveberm]

You do not want to create a new domain as you decribed. You simply
want to put another DC in your bunker - the same domain as your others.
This DC will also need to run a GC as Exchange requires a GC server.
You will probably want to create a seperate site (Sites and Services)
for the subnet that your bunker uses. This will help control AD
replication traffic. Windows will keep the AD controllers replicated.

Have you tested your replication to the DR site? Is your WAN big
enough to handle the traffic? You may want to do a rate of change
analysis to determine exactly how much data needs to be replicated.
This should give you an idea on how large your WAN connection should
be.

If you have not already bought DoubleTake, you may want to look at
other vendors in the market. DoubleTake suffers from latency when
replicating across the WAN. The following article points out, that
without some kind of WAN accelerator, DoubleTake can replicate about 46
MB per minute across a T3 with 40 ms of latency - at that is with
compression enabled!
http://www.eweek.com/article2/0,1895,1882828,00.asp

In contrast, LifeKeeper Data Replication from SteelEye Technology can
replicate ~283 MB per minute across that same line without enabling
compression or using any kind of WAN optimizer. Check out the
technology at http://www.steeleye.com/products/ext_mirroring.html.

SteelEye also has solutions for protecting SQL and Exchange and have
recently won an award for our Exchange product from Windows IT Pro.

DISCLAIMER: I am a SteelEye Employee

 

[ferg]

David,

Thanks very much for the feedback.
Can I contact you off the list?

Thanks

 

[daveberm]

Sure. Email david dot bermingham at steeleye dot com, or look at
steeleye dot com and call direct and ask for my number.

 

[ferg]

Thanks. Will do.