I'm an experienced network professional, but a complete newbie when it comes to ReadyNAS. I have been given the option to purchase a second user ReadyNAS 3200 and I was wondering if it could do the following:
I need to change the way that I support a Special Needs school with regards to offsite backup. I need to backup in real-time user data and Exchange (email) data. Is this something that this device can do?
I note and agree with your comments about a warranteed device. However in the first instance (for many obvious reasons: School, limited budget) I haven't really got that option. That's not to say that this will be the case in the future, if I can prove this technology to be sound enough to invest in. Of course this will mean that it will need to do what we are looking for it to do.
The environment that I am looking to use it in is a Hyper-V virtualised setup. There are multiple VM's running Windows Server 2008 & 2012. Of these server there is one MS SQL server, one File Server and one Exchange Server. I will need to backup all live databases from the SQL server, all user data on the File server and all user email data on the Exchange server ( at mailbox, or database level, or both ). I could backup complete VM's if easier, but this would increase backup sizes.
I was hoping that the ReadyNAS came bundled with agent software that would run on either the VM's OS, or indeed on the VH's OS.
I am currently using another vendors products to do exactly as you suggest and backup to a site device, which then trickles the data to a second offsite device. These devices lack capacity though and will shortly be outgrown.
You would need to use some server backup software to backup the data to a NAS. I would then replicate it off-site e.g. using Rsync over SSH or Rsync over your own VPN.
We don't bundle server backup software with the ReadyNAS and never have as far as I can recall, so you would need to purchase that software separately.
