I have 2 Dell PowerEdge Servers, a Dell T310 and a Dell T320 - both running Windows 2008 Server. My main application runs on the T320 (with Raid 1 on the data drive - configured using Dell utility), and I would like the T310 as a failover machine.
So - in my ideal world I would like the following:
- If T320 dies, I would like to remove one of the data drives (raid 1), put in in the T310, change the IP address and turn on the application.
- Backups are performed on USB and taken offsite.
- Looking for something quick so small business is not offline for hours.
This is not a problem from an application configuration perspective, however I am not sure about the concept of pulling out the mirrored drive and putting it into another server.
The reason I thought of this, was the size of the application does not lend itself to cloud storage. Also, the data cannot be replicated easily between both servers. We have about 300Gb of data.
Can anyone advise how this can best be done? Is this a silly idea?
A
If your DR plan involves pulling a disk out if a server and putting it into another one, you're in for a world of hurt. What if there's a fire? A flood? An earthquake? A tornado? What if there is data corruption mirrored to both disks?
In this case, it sounds like you can sustain downtime, so use Windows Backup to backup everything to a USB disk and keep it off site. You can restore from this to the T310 if necessary.
Of course, there are better, more high-tech solutions out there for this, but I think you'll be best served by keeping this one simple.