Hi,

They're a bit counter productive aren't they. You want to get the logs onto DR, but you also want to back them up. With log shipping you achieve number 1, but you cant back for local restore. With MSDP > AIR you can get them to the other side but you'll have to constantly restore them, and you can back them up local.

Both solutions are 50% ish.

Suggestion

Use storage foundation HA/DR + VVR (or hardware replication). This allows you to cluster the SQL between sites, have your DR site reading for action the whole time, and you back it up locally as much as you like, truncate or not truncate the logs.

Gotta spend some money though ;)

Cheers

Here is the key statement extracted from Symantec’s response… 

“I see no way to safely do what you’re describing; if the logs aren’t there due to having been truncated by the log shipping process they can’t be backed up by NBU, and clearly you can’t use NBU to truncate the logs because that will mess up log shipping. If the logs are truncated every 10 minutes you might be able to capture them with NBU if you execute NBU jobs frequently enough, but there’s no way to guarantee it.”

This comes from an internal Symantec NetBackup Technical Product Manager in Technical Field Enablement dept.

So leads us into a technical cul-de-sac.

Any integration / scripting / AIR magic would be at our own risk, as its not an off the shelf solution.

Thanks for the storage replication input. I would like to do that; did similar with EMC SRDF/CE some years ago for another client.

But as you say, its £££ & back to the drawing board.