backup volumes directly

[Lilaa]

Hi All,
I am exploring the possibility of backing up the volumes directly (mounted or not mounted to ESX servers). The purpose of this is to backup the remote volumes setup for replication to replicate production data to remote site.

Is it possible ? and what are my options - need help from experts.

Thanks

[Bryan McMullan]

You could just create a new cluster and setup your initial remote snapshots at your primary site, then take the nodes to your remote location to setup. I don't believe there is a software that will allow you to do what you are looking to do (if you are planning to use SAN/iQ replication moving forward).

[Lilaa]

How can i backup my remote site for archiving purpose ? for example if user corrupt my data in primary site that will over write my dr site too, so i will need to go back to one or few days back to restore in DR site - any help ?

[douglas carson_1]

There is no way to do this with the LHN Kit.
The things that you are looking at is things like EMC recover point. But this obviously doesnt help you much.
If you want to backup Volumes presented to a windows MS iSCSI initiator you can use things like off host backups, which presents a snapshot to a backup server and you can backup the volume as if it was a local drive on the backup server. I know symantec backup exec supports this.
There are some caveats like having all exchange servers having to have logs and databases on the same volume, which is why i dont use this backup method.
Hope this give you some help.
Dougie

[teledata]

If you are a Windows only shop I would strongly recommend looking at a product like: http://www.appassure.com/

It's an agent-based backup, but supports physical/virtual and is really a backup and a DR solution.

Essentially LeftHand SAN/iQ is a good DR solution, but a pretty poor "backup" solution, since it is difficult to restore "a file" from a point in time.

We use AppAssure, and present a LeftHand volume from one of our SATA clusters for it to backup to. (it does compression AND de-dupe), then I take that SATA volume (which contains only compressed, de-duped data) and use SAN/iQ Remote snapshot to replicate that offsite to a VSA we are running at another datacenter.

[Lilaa]

thanks for the reply,

did you mean i can directly go to the volume (remote and primary) and pull the data out ?
could i restore a volume from backup archive?