Setting up a disaster recovery site is a daunting task for most smaller IT departments. They'll need to find a site, contract for bandwidth between their office and the DR site, set up data replication, and learn how to babysit the whole thing, all while keeping the existing systems running. Sometimes, after I've managed the process for a client, I think changing the tires on a Greyhound bus as it rolls down the highway would be easier. Now Fujitsu Computer Systems has released a bundled solution that includes not just the disk arrays for both primary and DR sites, but also the hosting and bandwidth.

For around $200,000, you get a pair of Fujitsu Eternus4000 Model 300 disk arrays (with 3.6 TB of disk for the primary site and 1.7 TB for the DR site), the first year's charges on a Verizon T-3 line from your site to a Verizon colocation center up to 365 miles away, and hosting at the colo center. Fujitsu will set it all up, including the replication for up to 1 TB of data, and will serve as a single point of contact for service.

The Eternus4000 Model 300 is expandable to 90 TB of storage, has both Fibre Channel and iSCSI interfaces, and is expandable to up to 90 TB of disk. The array-to-array replication is through one of the iSCSI ports an includes encryption and WAN optimization.

It's not cheap but it would be easy to spend $200K on equipment, bandwidth, hosting, and services without getting as clean a package. Click here for the spec sheet.