Symptoms

 As the need to have backups on production data becomes more and more relevant, SoftNAS customers are often tasked with having an exact replica of their production data to a second environment for DR purposes. This will ensure business continuity in-terms of unforeseen circumstances.

Purpose

This KB will explore the different DR setups available to configure on SoftNAS without hurting overall system performance. There are currently 2 short term DR solutions (that we will explore shortly in great detail). However, SoftNAS is also committed to integrate a long term solution that will be part of the product in a future release.

Resolution

Zfs Send/Recv Solution:

Script located HERE (and linked again in below sections) 

This Solution uses the native ZFS send and receive method that replication uses to send data over to a DR environment. It can be run as a stand alone command, scheduled as a cron job, or run as a NiFi processor to replicate a volume to another softnas which is faster than rsync and consumes less resources.

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        */30 * * * *  /bin/bash ~/dr_copy.sh -v pool1/vol1 -r 10.10.1.199

Controlled Rsync Solution: 

As the heading implies, This type of rsync setup will ensure that once an rsync job is kicked off the process must run completely before another process is spawned. Since rsync is a resource intensive service, this approach  will minimize the performance impact it usually poses on production systems during heavy read/write operations by minimizing multiple rync processes of the same job while still ensuring DR compliance.

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