Disaster recovery solution

BSpendlove · February 13, 2017

I've been assigned a project with our backup system that we provide to all of our customers to implement a solution for customers that are wanting a bit better disaster recovery. I've setup everything for our customers, we use StorageCraft Shadow Protect which does the job as a small business. Currently, we provide the typical onsite backup with every customer but also provide offsite replication for those who want it.

In a short story/process, we set up a replication server at each site which holds all the local backups from servers/clients and we replicate them to our main office (which I believe is an R320 hooked to a powervault MD1200 then further replicated in the event of something happening at our office). We test our backups at least twice a week (which I feel like is ok since we are a 2 man team and get quite busy) using both hardware independent restore (restoring the backup onto a complete different server). We also test backups via VirtualBoot that is provided with our backup software to create a VM(in the scenario of a disaster, we would boot up the VM to replace the real server until the server is replaced or fixed)...

We want to provide a solution where in the event of a drive/server failing, we either have a rack server with many hotswappable drives that we can instantly grab and go to the site (our backups would have a HSR headstart restore so it is always restoring the newest incremental backup image to the drive). or we have a few tower servers that are ready to go in the event of a failure.

So what I am really asking is recommendations for towers/rack servers? We would only need a few of the same towers to be ready for the go (if a server failed) and a rack with around 12bays so if a drive fails we can just grab it and rush onsite to replace the drive...