Sangfor hDR: Choosing the Right Deployment Strategy for Large Data Environments

When designing a disaster recovery solution, deployment architecture and storage sizing can have a major impact on backup performance, recovery time, and overall DR efficiency.

Here are some useful points to consider when deploying Sangfor hDR:

1. Simplified hDR Deployment
The hDR system supports deployment on Sangfor HCI platforms. Importing the provided hDR VM template is the recommended approach, as it can simplify the installation process and reduce deployment time.

2. Consider the Network Bandwidth
For environments with large amounts of source data and relatively limited bandwidth between the source and destination sites, directly transferring all the data to the DR site may take an unacceptable amount of time.

In such scenarios, an alternative approach is to deploy the hDR platform on a physical machine at the source site.

This allows the initial data backup to be performed locally over a high-bandwidth connection, while the DR process can then be used to synchronize and fail over workloads to the destination environment when required.

3. Plan Storage Capacity Carefully
Storage sizing is another important consideration when designing an hDR environment.

As a general planning recommendation, the data disk capacity should be approximately 1.5–2× the amount of data that needs to be protected.

For example, if the disaster recovery data is 10 TB, planning approximately 15–20 TB of data disk capacity provides additional space for the DR workload and helps avoid insufficient storage capacity.

Key Takeaway:
A successful DR design is not only about having a recovery platform. You should also consider data volume, network bandwidth, deployment location, storage capacity, RPO/RTO requirements, and the expected recovery scenario.

Proper planning before deployment can significantly improve the efficiency and reliability of your disaster recovery strategy.