For 3 month now I am researching a better backup and more important a better Disaster recovery solution. I visited the SNA in Phoenix, AZ in April; I spent hundreds of hours on the web and on the phone with annoying ‘sales predators’ and have to come to the conclusion, that there are great solutions out there but nothing really under $30,000. In my opinion this is too much for a small and medium size company. There are some promising developments on the way and there is surely the classical Backup to tape solution, but we all know that they are unreliable and are not really useable for a disaster recovery; the occasional file for the quick fingered user yes, but a bare metal recovery of server?

The only feasible ways are either Disk to Disk to Tape (D2D2T) solutions or SANs. Both are expensive and there is not much transparency in the market due to too many different solutions.

I found an interesting article on www.techbuilder.org how to build up a cheap D2D2T solution and/or a very inexpensive iSCSI SAN. This sounds very promising and I am building up a test environment right now.

I will keep you posted how it will work out.

You want to discuss this issue, then do to our Bulletin Board…