Hi all,
I wonder if anyone is in a similar situation to me and has a solution to this problem. We run a hosting environment and are looking at the best way to automatically replicate backups offsite. Currently we manually remove the backups every day to offsite them but would like to have it done automatically. The hosting environment currently runs about 25 VMs of various shapes and sizes (SBS, Terminal Servers, Exchange, SharePoint either Server 2008 or 2008 R2), total data use is about 700GB. It is running on VMware ESX 4.1 and an HP LHN SAN.
We have a 10Mbps connection to our office which is physically about 8 miles away and would like to backup all the data over the 10Mbps connection to the remote office. I know we'll never fit full backups down that pipe every night so incrementals it will have to be. We are currently using Windows Server Backup which is actually a fantastic product (reliable and simple to restore from) but unfortunately it forces a full backup every 14 days even if incrementals are selected so it won't work over the 10Mbps connection.
I've looked at ShadowProtect which is pricey but might do the trick if we use ImageManager at either end and Acronis which looks a good price but I've never used it (any recommendations or warnings on this product??). VMware Data Recovery might do the job but how do you replicate to another site over a slow connection?
So, if anyone has any ideas, I'd love to hear them. I'm sure this must be a common scenario even for a branch office type arrangement
Your advice is much appreciated.
Richard