Hello!

 

I've got a client who was sold 2 small business servers by another vendor.  He was wanting a quick recovery solution so that if the main office SBS went down, then he would have minimal downtime to get back working.  I thought I had read when SBS 2003 was coming out that there was going to be some additional redundancy built in similar to that of a cluster, but have found out that this is not possible even with 2003. 

 

So I have brainstormed and read over various post on the internet, but I'd like to get some opinions of others out there that have run into similar situations.  Below are a few options that I've run accross, if anyone has any insight or a better option please let me know. 

 

1.    A DFS based solution with Server 2003 at a remote site, which would pretty much mirror the file data on the other server.  One question I have pertaining to this is would it be better to make this a member server so that if data had to be restored I could just start loading SBS on to the server and therefore have a great deal of the recovery process out of the way? 

 

2.  Imaging options-- I know there are several 3rd party imaging options out there.  My concern is how long does it take to image a server once a month and what kind of backup is best for this situation to enable a fast recovery.  Is there an imaging option that does not require the server to be completely down? 

 

3.  Does anyone know of any 3rd party clustering software that might work with SBS? 

 

Any other ideas would be much appreciated.

So I guess no one here has done DFS or any of above stuff before?  I know this is an odd question, but I have someone that actually wants to pay me to set this up.  Already tried to talk them out of it, but this guy is actually thinking of possibly moving to Enterprise software for his 5 person office just to make sure he has redundancy. 

 

I'm also considering the new Sonicwall product that offers remote backup capabilities.  Any insight would be great. 

I am wondering what could be so important on a 5 person company that you need this kind of redundancy. I use the standard backup solution and if I need to restore a server from a disaster it takes most of the time no longer then 3 maybe 4 hours if there is hardware available.

Well one thing is the guy has already purchased a good bit of the equipment.  We've already tried to let him know that the chance of him experiencing downtime is very minimal and that it's a waste of his money.  He still wants to do this.  On top of that he wants to have a remote backup solution as well.  Although biggest point is to have minimal downtime.

 

His restore would probably take a little longer than 3-4 hours, simply because he insist on having lots of extra data (family pictures etc) on the server. 

 

Hey I don't think it's the best idea either, but if I present him with a solution I want what meets his wants best.