In our environment, we have three physical servers that are running Windows Hyper-V to host various server images. The Images themselves are stored on a Dell Equallogic SAN connected via the iSCSI interface. THe volumes on the SAN are set for regular daily snapshots.
The problem we are facing is that this solution provides a lot of redudancy should anything go wrong with a given image, or the host server, but if something should go wrong with the SAN our entire operation is toast. After spending 40K on a SAN, Dell now wants us to spend another 30K on a second san for replication, or buy a different software package to backup the production iamges rather than the snapshots. =/
I refuse to believe that there isnt another way to set up a secondary server or device (other than another SAN) that can connect and just grab a copy of the server images from the snapshots. This may be something that the SAN pushes to another server, or something that the second server pulls from the SAN. I don't know.
I would be interested to hear what options others have chosen to manage their backups.