DR via SAN replication

  • 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?

  • We had put this together as a POC a few years ago, EMC SAN, bit replication.   It worked exactly as expected.  What did not work was the RTO. The manual steps to bring the server on-line, change the cnames, and so forth took longer than the RTO.

    The key here is to test it. 

    Not sure what version of SQL you are using, but mirroring was introduced in SQL 2008, and availability groups were introduced in 2012.  These may provide you with a better RTO, and easier management of the process.

    Michael L John
    If you assassinate a DBA, would you pull a trigger?
    To properly post on a forum:
    http://www.sqlservercentral.com/articles/61537/

Viewing 3 posts - 1 through 2 (of 2 total)

You must be logged in to reply to this topic. Login to reply