WAN Ideas

[nitrobass24]

So im planning on setting up my first WAN and I have no idea what i should do.
My family's business is an CPA practice. I live in a different city and perform work from my home office. I have a server with an iSCSI San that i use for personal non-work related items. At the main office location we have several servers:exchange, domain, dns, apps the works and every night the entire main office(Server, Workstations, Laptops) are backed up to tapes and are taken home. However, as we have grown this is becoming less and less efficient.
I was thinking that i could set up a wan and put my server on the same domain so it would be like a remote office location and part of the same network. I would then cook up some sort of backup solution that would backup the main office to my servers, and mine would be backed up on theirs. this way if there was a fire or something the backups would be at a different location.
Im not necessarily trying to do this the cheapest way I want to do this the right way.

As always thanks for your help.

 

[marley1]

site to site vpn.

however would really depend on the connection on both side or this probably wouldn't be that effective to backup.

if all your going after is backup, have you looked into something like Logmein Backup?

 

[jiggamanjb]

+1 for logmein stuff. Been using them for years. Great people.

 

[Grentz]

You would need very good connections on both sides or else it would take forever. Upload speed is the important factor, and most connections do not have that great of an upload speed.

 

[YeOldeStonecat]

If you got some backup software designed for going over thin connections...it would not take forever..just the first job takes a long time.

The first backup gets all the files...but with most of the internet based backup solutions...the next backups are much smaller. It will only backup the changes in files...compressed,...so often your recurring backups are barely 5-10% of the size of your original.

We use Remote-Backup for some of our clients.

 

[Grentz]

True, but it depends what they are dealing with.

We do work for a CPA that is paperless and the files are HUGE, so even daily backups are very very large.

 

[Captain Colonoscopy]

If you want to do it right you could put in bonded T1 lines at each location. Then throw in a Cisco 2811 router at either end to do the bonding and also run WAAS with NM-WAE502 blades to do WAN acceleration. We have set this up for a few different clients and it works very well. You can also do this over a VPN tunnel and DSL/Cable. I should also note that the 2800 series routers are capable of bonding DSL circuits together if your ISP can get you two separate lines. You could also look at WAN acceleration products from Riverbed, I hear they work well too but can't speak from experience.

You could also look at data deduplication to reduce the amount of data that is transmitted over the WAN.

 

[nitrobass24]

thanks captain thats the kind of advice i was looking for.
We currently have cable internet at both places. If I do a VPN tunnel will that let me be on the same domain?

 

[Captain Colonoscopy]

The VPN tunnel will allow both locations to be on the same domain. Just make sure the machines on your end either use the DNS servers on the other end or forward requests to that side. Otherwise, you may run into issues finding a domain controller for the domain.

 

[twwabw]

I use Availl WAFS (wide area file services) at a client site. Replicates shares at both locations real-time, supports Windows file locking, etc. Not an accelerator, but literally replicates the data. Awesome. Been very happy with the for the last 1-1/2 years.