LCR/CCR/SCR - Which is more popular in your environment?

[sflynn]

Since Microsoft's replication is gaining more and more popularity, I thought I'd see what's more popular in your environment. SME works seamlessly with both LCR/CCR to provide solid backup/restore/high availability for your Exchange data...and also providing a time-stamp based recovery solution. SCR is indeed slightly different since you cannot backup a target database...only the source database.

I just thought I'd pose the question for folks and get an idea on what you're using.

[reinoud7]

Today, we use EX2003 with the normal cluster technology and a metrocluster (with syncmirror) on the storage site. This year, we'll migrate to EX2007 and we'll use CCR on the exchange site and of course we'll stop using the metrocluster, because every server will have his own storage (on NetApp of course )

[sflynn]

Any plans for using SCR? Is it even a blip on the radar for your environment?

[reinoud7]

It's a blip, but far far away. CCR is perfect for us, we have to active data centers on our main site (250 meters of each other). We have a small third DR data center, but we use this only for storing our backup (online on disk). So use snapvault to go to the DR-site (but there are no servers, only the data).

I don't think that we'll use SCR soon.

[bamsterdoomed]

Hi Reinoud,

I was wondering if you could give a very short overview as to why you still use SME w/SyncMirror as opposed to SCR, which MS says can replace SnapManager and SnapMirror. I assume SCR does not 'solve' the backup problem, and I understand there is some overhead in replication. Can you comment on why you've made your choice for SME/SyncMirror, and will that change?

Hope to see you sometime again,

thanks,

bam gobets (databasement)

[lamarca]

One of the things to think about here is that SCR is really a replacement for long distance replication.  Not the imediate backup and recovery ability of an SME has in your environments.  SyncMirror's really similar to LCR, as both have latency and distance limitations.  I think if you are looking at SCR then SnapMirror os the equivalent, it all depends on how often you are running your snapmirror updates to see what can give you the better RPO and RTO.

But SME is still a tool that should be used when looking at backups locally and more importantly the recovery processes, especially if you look at the SMBR (Single Mailbox Recovery) software.  With SME you can create local recovery points that will taken minutes to recover from.