EMC RepliStor SMB Edition

The Synchronisation settings control how the data will be synchronised. For example, you might be setting up several Specifications and not want them kicking off right away. In this case, you can set the initial synchronisation to occur at a time. The method of sync can be incremental, based on attribute changes and you can create an audit log.

What is useful, especially if you have a lot of files to work with, is that you can create scripts to do this. When you create scripts there is a test option so that you can debug them before they become part of your production environment.

With the SMB version, each pack that you get contains a single licence key. This is where the product could do with some significant clarity in its documentation. When you install the product on a server you can create both source and target directories. However, unless the target directory is on a NAS or SAN box, then the source and target are only valid for that particular server. If you want to install on a second machine, you need another licence key.

This is not clearly explained and during the test we lost time trying to work out why we couldn't have the source and target on different computers. This is sold as an SMB product and most products in this space come with multiple licences, albeit limited to no more than five. The need to have the server on a computer, even when it is just a source computer is also not well documented and EMC should consider having target, source and client components to make this much easier and clearer during the installation process.

Once we had resolved this, RepliStor ran extremely well. It kept things updated in the background and didn't seem to interfere with the network or the servers at all. If you are moving a lot of data then you can configure bandwidth throttling but most small businesses shouldn't need this. The big hit is on the initial synchronisation but this could be done by temporarily locating the source and target machines at the same location.