[ILUG] Disaster Recovery

[Gareth Eason]

	DR to dissimilar boxen is a very non-trivial exercise. If it's your 
home / toy network then it's fine - but if you're talking about a 
commercial system, my humble advice (from experience) would be to just 
make sure that you can source similar (if not identical) hardware within 
a reasonable period of time.

	Of course, if you can run systems in parallel and only need to DR your 
data, then running a hot backup (tested regularly and updated as 
appropriate) may be an option.

	But as a generic question, DR to non-similar hardware is a huge trap. 
If a system is worth having a DR policy in place for, it's probably 
worth spending enough money to (mostly) duplicate hardware to avoid 
downtimes, etc. If SLAs are involved, then you'd have to really work 
very hard indeed to convince me to run DR on to non-identical / similar 
equipment :-) Beware of false-economy - or possibly worse - a false 
sense of security that you have a DR system, but in actual fact it's 
pretty much useless in the case where you need it.

	Apologies if this has helped not one whit - for some reason I felt like 
venting my opinion :-) YMMV (and probably will), IANAL, usual 
disclaimers apply, etc.

	Best regards,
	-->Gar


Darren Burnett wrote:
> Looking to implement DR for our Linux boxes.  All are RHAS 2.1 + 3.  We will 
> need to be able to do a DR to different hardware.  Has anybody done this and 
> are there any recommended steps.  Also we are using TSM for our backups so if 
> anybody has steps for this product it would be appreciated, but any advice or 
> tips on how to DR to different hardware is fine.
>