SAN Replication for disaster recovery

  • Hi,

    I am not a DBA. But have been looking into my company's DR procedures, and the SQL Server procedures weren't like anything I've heard of before. Wanted to get some opinions on here so see how common a strategy it is and whether is it sensible.

    The production instance disks are SAN replicated, to the DR server, which has SQL Server installed but a stopped instance. In the event of the production server going down, then the DR server SQL Instance is started. Then there is only a change to set the @@machine_name to the DR server name. Access to sql server is via a CNAME which is switched over to the DR server.

    Any thoughts?

  • Hi,
    The short answer is yes. Assuming that every of your DR procedures works well. In my experience, if you are confident with the san discs replication as the whole DR plan, its fine. But it is better to test the worst case scenario and see if the DR procedures are ok and updated.
    The SAN by itself, depending on how it is configured, provides data redundancy, so it have to be a catastroph incident to make you san unavailable and you have to switch to the DR facility. In my experience the SQL server fails more often than the SAN, so it is better to have redundancy on SQL server also, perhaps a cluster. Here is when licences costs enter to stage, because it is expensive.
    You have to check also, the backup/restore procedures in order to have full view of the DR plan, and I believe this is the first step on the list.

    Hope this helps.

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