|
The first thing to consider in this context may be the availability of local skills at both remote sites. You are referring to the sites as being "consultant sites", which seems to imply that technical resources might not be readily available for these locations. If this assumption is correct, you might want to avoid a backup solution requiring remote intervention. You may want to weigh the cost of implementing a remote data replication solution against the possibility of data loss.
A centralized backup solution for each site would require some technical skills and system administration cycles for each site. Copying or backing up data to low cost, removable storage media certainly looks interesting from a cost saving perspective. However, it introduces a requirement for media handling and manual intervention, which often goes hand-in-hand with human error.
There are a number of interesting and affordable hardware independent data replication solutions currently available on the market. Combined with a network attached storage solution, which could either be appliance based or from a more traditional file server for each site, they can offer scalable storage with hands-free data protection for the remote sites. Once replicated to your local site, this data could then be centrally backed up as required without interfering with the remote production copies.
Without mentioning any specific vendors (to avoid offending anyone by omission), a little research on low cost data replication will reveal a number of software-based offerings.
|
