Spare SAN, what to do with it?

jank

We have here a spare EMC CX300 SAN. It is out of warranty at the moment but it is all working away as it should.

Now we have 2 other SANs that are used in production. They are a HP MS1500 and an IBM DS4700.

Basically I am looking for ideas for what to do with the spare EMC SAN.

What I am thinking is that we can use it for some off-site disaster recovery storage. We have another small office up the road with a fiber connection.
So transferring large amounts of data is OK.

Has anyone played with SAN backup software that does a block by block copy from one SAN to another and does this software work with SAN's from different vendors.

Any ideas on what else I could use it for other than a large expensive paper weight?

IronMan

You could use something like EMC Recoverpoint. This allows for data movement between different vendor arrays, and allows you to do some neat point in time rollbacks etc for your applications. You would need an appliance in each site. Not sure about the cost, but being EMC I expect $$$$$$$.

$ausage$

Hey

We have something very like that.

We have an off site DR with fiber link we use Symantic Back Exec 12.
Goo for what it does and is even better for restoring! saves so much time that restoring of LTO's! I think you should maybe do the off site DR. Plus would look better for your Audit and police reporting. (Do you even have them in the south?)

If you want any help or more in just shout!

1Love

Jonny

Static M.e.

I would be careful that you dont use an out of warranty SAN for any sort of business option, DR or not.
If you get asked whats our DR strategy? do you mention that you have a SAN in another site that you are using for DR. If that is the case, then do you not think that your DR option should be under warranty.

If the SAN isnt good enough to have its warranty extended and the business is ok with that, then take that SAN out of your business environment and only use it for some thing which has no business value.


You could build a nice VMware test environment with it or try using it to run some virtual applications with Citrix again in a test environment.

$ausage$

Yeh but its a back up of a back up really so if it failed it wouldnt be the end of the world. Its just to have as an extra extra backup. you can never have enough! I like the VM ware idea we are using our old CX box for it now to see how it reacts but at present not having a great amount of joy due to our bespoke software.

If you where thinking of VM ware then I like statics idea of the test enviro that way if it fails all will not be lost. But if your gentle with it i cant see you having much problems*


*not a guarantee

jank

Well the SAN is quite old at this stage and I am not even sure if EMC will let us have a warranty on it at this stage.

We just want to have some storage off site. We have a big tape library that does its backups everyday and this will still be the case.

We use backup exec but we are also going to use an app called shadow protect where you can schedule a copy of a server and it creates an image.

At the moment we have no storage off site so the worst that can happen is that if the SAN breaks months down the line then we will revert back to this case.

The good thing is that this will cost us nothing!

Was looking into some fancy real time replication software but feck that the simpler solution will do just fine!