Being ONline OFFsite is the all new DR plan!

When organizations are taken into consideration, based on the current vulnerable state of data, it is highly important for an organization to maintain reliable backups. While talking about backup, it is generally Onsite. i.e; Backup of the critical and sensitive data is maintained in the production environment itself.

But for your data to abide by the term “always available”, a single backup of your data in the production site alone is not sufficient. You need to have a copy of your data available somewhere in another location. When disaster hits or if there is some server crash, downtime or any type of data loss, your data becomes inaccessible and business goes offline and the term offline in terms of business would be the biggest nightmare for any businessman. As the title states, being ONline OFFsite is the DR Plan. For disaster recovery have your data in an offsite location which will help you keep your business always online.

There comes into role play the Vembu OffsiteDR. An interesting idea of creating the second copy of your backup in an offsite location away from the onsite location.

When Vembu is taken into consideration, the onsite & offsite management of your backup data can be performed in 4 steps.

Step 1: Create a Vembu portal account
Step 2: Download and Install Vembu BDR – Link the BDR to the Portal
Step 3: Download and Install Vembu OffsiteDR – Link the ODR to the Portal
Step 4: Link BDR and ODR

Creating a Vembu Portal Account

The portal Account can be created by logging in to portal.vembu.com with the help of Signup option available. Entering the details and following few procedures will make your portal account ready.

Procedures include verification of the given email ID and creating a new password that will help you login to the portal.

Vembu Portal and Vembu BDR or even the vice versa!

The above statement is in reference to the ability of the BDR and portal account to be linked in either of the two following ways. Step 1 and Step 2 can also be swapped.

The portal can be created and then the Vembu BDR Suite software can be downloaded directly from the portal (as mentioned) else the Vembu BDR Suite can be first downloaded from the website and after the installation, a few step navigation in the BDR itself will help you create the portal account.

Linking the Vembu BDR to the Portal

The linking procedure can be done from the BDR server. Navigate to Management-> Server Management-> Server Registration and enter the Portal e-mail ID and the password and click on Register.

Now, your Vembu BDR is linked to your Vembu Portal account.

Note: Even, If you have downloaded the BDR from the portal then the manual linking procedure should be followed for registering the BDR to your Portal.

Vembu OffsiteDR

Directly log into www.vembu.com and in the product tab, choose the Vembu Offsite DR and click Download. Else from the BDR server console, you can click on the download symbol available there which will take you a page of all the client’s download. Choose Offsite DR and then click on the installer.

After the download, install the Vembu Offsite DR with administrator rights and this ODR has to be linked to the portal. So navigate to Management-> Server Management->Server Registration-> where your OffsiteDR ID will be already mentioned and you need to enter the Portal e-mail ID and password you created.

Connecting the BDR to ODR

To begin the process of every backup getting copied to the offsite DR, the final step of linking the BDR to the ODR has to be performed.

• In the BDR server, navigate to Management-> offsite copy management-> offsite copy configuration and where you need to enable this and choose Vembu OffsiteDR Server
• Enter the IP address of the machine where you have installed the Vembu OffsiteDR
• Further, you can configure the Windows settings, Retention settings, Bandwidth Throttling, and Seed backup settings

From the above mentioned configuring options, Windows settings help you choose the time during which you do not want offsite replication to take place.

Retention settings help to choose the number of latest restore points you want to maintain in OfsiteDR server for your image-level and file-level backups.

Bandwidth Throttling helps you choose the time frame and set the bandwidth limit, for throttling the bandwidth at the same range, so that other critical production work doesn’t get affected. You get options to enable bandwidth throttling always or disabling it during the weekends.

Seed existing backup data option will allow you to export the secondary copy of backup data on to an external drive (HDD/USB). After which the backup data is imported to OffsiteDR server manually. This prevents a large amount of data being transferred over the internet which obviously saves the bandwidth. Further, you can also set the backup size after which the data need to be seeded.

Finally, save your replication settings after which every backup you perform in the Vembu BDR, will be replicated as a second copy to the Vembu OffsiteDR.

Check out the detailed configuration procedure of Vembu OffsiteDR in the video tutorial.