Cloning/Mirroring one server to another

Topic

New Reply

I have been put in charge of IT. God help me. The company has just purchased two identical servers, one to serve as the main network server and the other is to be used as a back-up in case of the main server failing. The IT company we are using says that we have purchase Cloning software. Is this true?

Any advice would be appreciated as I am in over my head.

Regards

Reply | Quote

Replies

Here are three products to investigate: Symantec LiveState Recovery Standard Server 3.0, Acronis – Online system disk backup, disk imaging, disk cloning, and bare-metal restore solution, and TeraByte Unlimited – Storage Software Solutions – Disk Storage Utilities and Security. There are others. See Google Search: server backup for lots more to investigate. You really need to have corporate direction and a plan for recovery considering such things as 1.) how long can you afford to be down, 2.) how current does the backed up data need to be, 3.) what can you afford, 4.) what you have to do legally. You may want to look at Google Search: computer disaster planning for more information.

Joe

--Joe

Reply | Quote

Thank you for the links. As to your question, 1) we can’t afford to be down, 2) the data needs to be current 3)Lots of money but they want to keep the cost to a minimum.

What happened last month was the hard drive on the server failed and the idiot who was supposed to be doing the back ups hadn’t been diong their job. Luckily we were able to rescue a lot of the information but it was chaos for a week. The idea was that two new servers would sit side by side with one would be mirroring (RAID) the other so if something happened we could switch over immediately. One person in the office said that this can be done without cloning software. Their IT credentials are less than mine, but I have to investigate. So again the question is, do we have to buy cloning or mirroring software or is this just a rouse by the IT company to get us to spend more money.

Thanks for your time.

Reply | Quote

I would suggest the fastest way to recover from a failed hard drive would be to use Raid 1 – see this definition – which requires two identical drives on the same server. (It is the least efficient raid setup as you literally double your hard disc requirement, but it is probably the most reliable.)

In parallel to this, I would have a backup server to which you make regular ‘cloning’ backups as per Joe’s previous suggestions. This should give you both your belt and your braces.

(With Raid 1, if one HD fails, you simply disconnect it and intruct the Raid Controller to ‘break’ the mirror, leaving you with one, intact HD. As soon as convenient, you replace the failed item and carry on with minimal interuption. I think Raid can be either software or hardware controlled, depending on your system.)

Reply | Quote

Hetty

The terminology for what you seem to need is “Hot-Swap Server” and I’m surprised that the supplying company hasn’t talked about Cluster Servers (either Microsoft’s or someone else’s). Well worth reading up on what’s available over the next few weeks, including RAID-5 SCSI disk arrays, switches (e.g. Brocade) and servers running with RAID-1 operating system disks. The magic word which will appear everywhere is “redundant”. You are aiming for servers, switches and the like to “fail over” to another in the event of the failure of the first. To do all this properly you aren’t going to get much change out of

Reply | Quote

Thanks John and to everyone for their advice.

I think this is what the company wants but I am not sure that they would be willing to spend 50-100K. With the amount they have in mind, I don’t think they are going to get the seamless swap if the main server fails. I think they’re under the impression that when one goes down they won’t know its happened unless they’re told.

As to a steep learning curve, lets hope I go up and not down!

Regard

Reply | Quote

If it was a smaller amount of data youi wanted to have online (ours was about a terabyte) the price could be lower than

Reply | Quote