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How to copy content to secondary content server

sanu

Hi All,

We have a primary and secondary (DR) TeamSite server in production, where the secondary will be used as a backup only. Once in every 6 hrs, the content will be copied from primary to secondary. What is the best way of doing this? The content and EAs should get copied.

Thanks very much,
Sanal

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Adam Stoller

Hi All,

We have a primary and secondary (DR) TeamSite server in production, where the secondary will be used as a backup only. Once in every 6 hrs, the content will be copied from primary to secondary. What is the best way of doing this? The content and EAs should get copied.

Thanks very much,
Sanal

There's no one right answer - it depends on how things are set up in your environment, the hardware architecture, what amount of downtime you're prepared to have every 6 hours, etc.

You're basic choices are share or copy the entire store or copy all differences between the stores. The mechanism you choose to use for this depends on what you have available, but clearly OD should be a potential consideration.

karel

possible 0-downtime solutions:

Modify your submit workflow to programmatically add the new content on your backup server using cssdk. Downside, you only have a backup of submitted data. Upside, your data is always uptodate, and not 6 hours behind.

But as Ghoti pointed out: everything depends on your requirements.

karel

The mechanism you choose to use for this depends on what you have available, but clearly OD should be a potential consideration.

Can OD deploy content between TS stores?

Migrateduser

Can OD deploy content between TS stores?

Why wouldn't it be able to?

karel

awch ... Oké, I've some reading to do.

Of course, if OD can deploy from the production store to the backup store, there's no need for all the workflow/CSSDK stuff.

Adam Stoller

possible 0-downtime solutions:

1) Modify your submit workflow to programmatically add the new content on your backup server using cssdk. Downside, you only have a backup of submitted data. Upside, your data is always uptodate, and not 6 hours behind.

2) [I'm no hardware expert!!] Place iw-store on a mirrored, hot swappable harddrive setup. Every 6 hours take out one drive, en sync it with your backup server. (Oké, I do not recommend to do in such an unprofessional manner, but I believe HP has an automated backup mechanism that uses the idea I described above). Downside, pretty expense. Upside, using such a hyper expensive backup mechanism can revert your entire server, so not just TS, in about 5 minutes.

(BTW, I've tried the unprofessional and manual harddrive swapping thing, and it worked like a charm.)

But as Ghoti pointed out: everything depends on your requirements.

I'd be very wary of anything that claims zero-downtime for replicating TS backing stores. Minimal downtime, yes, but zero-downtime is probably asking for trouble because you should not attempt to replicate the content store without at least freezing the store or potentially stopping the services [gracefully) and then unfreezing/restarting the services afterwards.

Even with NetApp boxes, unless you get things configured to do cross-data-cener synchronous writes (rather expensive operation as I recall) - you still need to have at least some [minimal] downtime in order to force the synchronization of the backing store across servers in a manner that will preserve the point-in-time stability of the store.

Bjorn

Hi All,

We have a primary and secondary (DR) TeamSite server in production, where the secondary will be used as a backup only. Once in every 6 hrs, the content will be copied from primary to secondary. What is the best way of doing this? The content and EAs should get copied.

Thanks very much,
Sanal

I hate to brain dump, but...

What I cannot figure out from your post is which is more important: backup or redundancy. Is the primary concern "What if we lose the current data?" or "What if we lose access to modify data?" One is a redundancy issue, the other is a backup issue. One addresses the issue of your ContentStore getting screwed up and you needing access to an unscrewed-up backup version to continue working, the other address your TeamSite server. Is it more important to have instant failover with potentially stale data? Or slower recovery with the freshest data?

(Also, what are you going to do when the "issue" is resolved with the primary server? Does the primary just become the secondary and vice versa? Or will you need to write back your data to primary, if the secondary server comes into play? If you're going to try two way syncronization, have fun with that! Also, do you have a large user population? How will you keep both server sync'd in terms of users, groups, roles, etc? Just some other considerations.)

My suggestion, if you have the means, is to move your ContentStores off local volumes and use some flavor of NAS. (We do this, but not really for any of the reasons I'm suggesting you do so.) If for some reason the TeamSite server gets obliterated, you can remap the LUNs to your other server and you're good to go (well...once you remap the stores with iwidmap). We've never had to do this, but it would work. This is not an instant failover, but as long as the failure was only with non-storage hardware, the downtime is only as long as it takes you to do the remapping. If the failure is related to the storage, then you can do what Adam suggested in an earlier post and get something like SnapDrive from NetApp, which offers near instant snapshot backups.

sanu

Thanks very much all for your responses. I defenitely got a few answers to persent in front of my clients.

To add to this, what if I use any other copy tool like xcopy or robocopy? Will they copy the EAs also along with the content (my understanding is that EA is a TeamSite specific entity and can be copied only by a TeamSite copy tool like OD)?

Thanks very much,
Sanal

Bjorn

To add to this, what if I use any other copy tool like xcopy or robocopy? Will they copy the EAs also along with the content (my understanding is that EA is a TeamSite specific entity and can be copied only by a TeamSite copy tool like OD)?l

You are correct. They exist only in the ContentStore. Any other opensource or other tools for copying will only move the data as a file from filesystem to filesystem, thus excluding TeamSite-specific metadata.