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DR Series Best Practice Guide

Replication Setup and Planning

The DR appliance provides robust replication capabilities to provide a complete backup solution for

multi-site environments. With WAN optimized replication, only unique data is transferred to reduce

network traffic and improve recovery times. Replication can also be scheduled to occur during non-

peak periods, and prioritizes ingest data over replication to ensure optimal backup windows. The

following sections cover the various considerations and planning that should be taken into account for

replication with the DR4100 backup appliance. As always, the information provided below are

guidelines and best practices and are meant to be supplemental to the information provided in the DR

administration guide.

Replication considerations

 Different DR models, older & newer, larger & smaller, virtual and physical can replicate to and

from each other if they are running the same OS version (major.minor). For example. A

DR4000 can replicate to a DR6300 if they are both running version 3.2.X version.

 Replicated data is already compressed and deduplicated prior to its transfer to the destination

DR appliance. This results in approximately 85%- 90% reduction in data being transferred from

the source to the target device.

 Bandwidth throttling works between pairs of devices.

 Replication supports none, 128bit, 256bit and encryption options. 128 bit encryption is

recommended.

 Replication uses a 10MB TCP window by default. Contact support if this is needed to be

adjusted higher for high latency/low bandwidth links.

 Replication can be scheduled on a per container basis.

 Container names should match on each DR to simplify disaster recovery.

 Replication also replicates CIFS and NFS security bits. For CIFS shares the target DR also needs

to be in the same domain or forest as the source DR for ACLs to be applied correctly.

 The DR replication target container is read only until the replication relationship with the

primary DR is removed.

Replicating Containers

For optimum replication performance, it is recommended that the number of replication containers be

kept at a minimum.

When planning larger deployments, the following recommendations should be considered to maintain

an acceptable level of performance:

1. In larger environments it can be easy to quickly approach a DR container limit. A simple

method to reduce the number of replicated containers is to leverage container directories.

2. In some scenarios it may become necessary to replicate more than a DR container limit to a

single physical site. In such a situation it is required to utilize two separate head units and