Moving backup data offsite is pretty much something that you have to do to protect against an event like a fire at your primary site that could potentially take out both your production data and the backup data. In the old days most companies would send tape backups offsite in a rotation to provide that extra layer of protection. These days with disk backup target solutions becoming very popular moving data offsite can be done over the wire instead of driving it in a vehicle to another location. So having a backup application that can automatically replicate backup data to another offsite location is a requirement to having a solid data protection solution.
Vembu’s OffsiteDR add-on product to Vembu VMBackup offers an additional layer of data protection by allowing users to replicate data to offsite to another data center from their primary backup server. This provides users the capability to be able to restore data directly from the OffsiteDR server in a manner similar to restoring from a backup server with minimal downtime. When doing this users will have multiple restore options to recover their data including:
- Booting a live VM
- Mounting image file to disk management
- Downloading image in your native format like VHD, VHDX, VMDK, VMDK-Flat and RAW
- Live restore to your ESX(i) server
This provides users an alternate system from which to recover protected VMs and physical servers using the same procedures that administrators employ on a Vembu backup server. This is accomplished by using a Live Data Transfer method that can instantly transfer data from a Vembu backup server to another location hosting a OffsiteDR Server. By using Live Data Transfer it enables seamless communication between servers, so that the OffsiteDR Server stays continually up-to-date.
Recently openBench Labs assessed the performance and functionality of the Vembu OffsiteDR Server to examine the ability to restore data in the event of a catastrophic failure in a vSphere environment. They used several real world application workloads in their backup scenarios and demonstrated how you can achieve aggressive RPO’s with minimal impact on your active workloads. You can read the full results of their testing and results posted on Vembu’s website.
