Using DRD to recover at DR site

[Debbie Beresford]

I have been asked to eliminate tape backups from our environment.  We are currently using a disk to disk dedup backup.  The backup disks are at our DR site so they are protected and offsite.  The only tape backups we are now doing are ignite backups for recovery.  I have 4 HP systems all running hp-ux 11.23 PARisc.

I have done some research on DRD and installed it on our system.  The idea is to backup the DRD disk to our offsite storage.  Should we have a disaster, we would mount the drd disk at the DR site and reboot from that.  I have not tested this yet.  We would also run DRD sync via cron weekly to keep the DRD image updated.  I did find a link from 2012 on the forums that indicates DRD is not good to use for this purpose.  I was wondering if thoughts have changed as newer versions of DRD have been released and there is now the rehosting option as well.

Any thoughts or suggestions are greatly appreciated.

http://h30499.www3.hp.com/t5/System-Administration/DRD-Can-it-replace-Make-Recovery/m-p/5741441#M481184

[Bill Hassell]

The main issue is with vg00 and bootup. With non-vg00 VGs, alternate storage is usually fairly easy assuming that the current system can 'see' the storage, which includes having the right I/O and driver for the DR storage.

However, if your vg00 VGs are internal disks, there will be a lot of work to verify it will boot from totally different hardware. For really old PARISC systems (and/or old firmware on fibre channel cards), a DRD copy will not boot because the hardware path and driver may not exist when pointed to the DR storage.

A more portable solution would be to setup and Ignite server at the DR site, then backup vg00 (only) to the DR Ignite server. When a DR situation occurs, a new box at the remote site can be installed in less than an hour, even if the hardware is slightly different. If the DR connection speed is reasonable (5-10 Mbit/sec or more), you could make the DR site the Ignite server for all your HP-UX boxes - with each make_net_recovery essentially verifying that the DR site is working OK. Of course, once setup, a DR rehearsal of at least one DR box recovery is in order.

[Debbie Beresford]

Thanks very much for this information.  I am going to go to management and see what they say.  Hopefully they will be able to get budget for another server.