A tragedy recovery site build is a huge

A tragedy recovery site build is a huge task, with multiple points of financial chance that can undermine the project. This particular write-up discusses ways that you can decrease cost and mitigate risk in your disaster recovery project.

Saving vital datacenter space in your production place could fund 100% of your DR project. Consider moving, upgrading and repurposing development, testing or increasing age production equipment from your primary site to DR. This way you can generate newer technology to the primary position and transition aging IT assets to the DR location. By doing so you not only reduce the IT capital cost of your DR project; you also take back data center floor space in your generation location and provide an opportunity to refresh products at your primary location.

Data storage hardware is one of the fastest growing and many expensive pieces of the DR bigger picture. There are two effective ways to reduce fees: One, consider reconfiguring and repurposing an existing IBM, EMC or NetApp array from a production location to be able to DR. Two, consider buying a employed SAN storage array that has been reconfigured to meet your requirements. By doing so you could save from $30, 000 to $300, 000, or more, depending on the configuration.

For SAN connectivity, you may need FCIP routers, SAN directors, switches, HBAs and additional network equipment at your new location, in conjunction with Bluecoat, Riverbed or Cisco WAN acceleration to reduce bandwidth costs. By purchasing and deploying used Cisco MDS or used Brocade SAN company directors in the site build, you can save $50, 000 to $150, 000, getting out of the relationship room to buy the WAN speed products and bringing you long-term, recurring personal savings on bandwidth.

Moving equipment via production to DR can cause several logistical nightmares. As an insurance policy against an unforeseen outage, consider using Golf swing or Rental IT hardware, specifically EMC or IBM storage arrays, to migrate data and offset your move. One of our consumers leveraged this technique and rented a great EMC storage array for two months. He shipped the array to his production location, migrated the information, then used the rental array in production, while he shipped their own primary system to their new location. This gave them the peace of mind and timeframe to move systems from their leisure to DR, and prevent the kind of "rush job" that usually ends in failure.

There are many ways that you can move and protect data involving datacenters, including IBM, SVC, ELECTRONIC COUNTER MEASURE (ECM) Mirrorview, Commvault, Inmage, Veeam, data source clustering, log shipping NetApp FAS2040 and others. When making your recovery strategy, investigate multiple options and make sure to choose the one that best meets your RPO and RTO objectives. Pricing and functionality may differ widely with replication technology, so do your homework; your options may be more cost-effective than you think. Further, by coupling the replication technology with used SAN storage arrays or upgrades with a 30-70% cost reduction, and you can repeat and keep more data on hard drive, rather than tape.

You will no doubt face plenty of challenges and choices when you build your Disaster Recovery facility, yet hopefully these ideas will get a person off to a good start.