SUPPORTDR Sites and Turbo Restore Appliances
TurboRestore appliances at DR sites
A TurboRestore appliance (TRA) is usually located at a site with a significant amount of data but limited bandwidth so that large restores go quickly by virtue of being on the LAN. From a disaster recovery perspective you need to assume that the appliance would be lost in a disaster along with the other servers and equipment at the site.
If a customer has (or wants to have) a designated disaster recovery site as part of a DR plan, another option is to place the TRA at the disaster recovery site so that data can be restored onto standby or replacement servers over the DR site's LAN at the 20 to 30GB/hr rate that is typical of TRA restores. One appeal to this setup is that multiple servers can be protected by one TRA, so the only dedicated hardware needed at the DR site under normal circumstances is the TRA unit itself. Normal delta backup traffic goes over the customers WAN connection to reach the appliance, and the appliance can replicate to the Iron Mountain data vaults from the DR site.
One further extension to this setup is to have dedicated standby servers at the DR site to facilitate a rapid failover in the case of a disaster, without the cost, bandwidth and expense of installing a separate replication product. Suppose that each Friday you did a restore from the TRA onto the standby server, so this server has all the data needed in event of a disaster. If a true disaster were to strike the following Wednesday, doing a restore to get the most recent, Wednesday, data will go much more quickly than you might expect because LiveVault's Delta Restore means that only the new and changed data blocks since Friday will actually be restored.
Unfortunately, LiveVault does not provide a way to automatically refresh the standby server in this scenario. Each restore has to be initiated through the user interface. However, if an administrator should forget to do a refresh restore some particular week, no significant harm has been done to the organization's disaster preparedness, and can be "corrected" by doing a refresh restore at any time.
