Dell PowerVault DL2000 - Manual (Page 17)

ESG LAB VALIDATION
Dell PowerVault DL2000 Powered by CommVault
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Copyright  2008, The Enterprise Strategy Group, Inc. All Rights Reserved.
Remote/Branch Office Protection
Remote and branch offices (ROBOs) house a large portion of enterprise data, yet most still rely upon tape-based
backup methods managed by non-IT staff. Non-IT staff performing backups and handling tapes increases both
the risk of data loss and the cost of data protection, while backups, snapshots, staging, and archiving all
significantly increase the amount of storage under management.
In a distributed environment typical of small to medium-size enterprises, limited network capacity makes it
impractical to centralize backup operations with traditional backup architectures over the WAN. Moving even
daily incremental backup data sets across the WAN requires so much bandwidth and time that even this simple
process can quickly become prohibitively expensive and inefficient.
The Dell PowerVault DL2000 Powered by CommVault addresses these issues using the Continuous Data
Replicator agent (CDR) to protect critical applications by moving data across the WAN as it is written to the local
DL2000 Appliance as seen in Figure 15.
FIGURE 15. CONTINUOUS DATA REPLICATION
ESG Lab Testing
A remote office was simulated locally to test the CommVault CDR agent with the DL2000 appliance. A second
DL2000 was configured as the remote replication target and a 100 Mbps LAN connection linked the two systems
together. In this test, ESG Lab used continuous data replication (CDR) to protect a virtualized Microsoft
Windows file server running under VMware ESX. As seen in Figure 16, ESG Lab set a daily replication schedule
to send all changes across the link to the remote system and create a restorable snapshot every 15 minutes.