Disaster recovery networking / HA

Hi all,

We’re currently building out our disaster recovery (DR) facility which is offsite from my main building.

At our main site we have a Meraki MX100 Firewall connected to 2 ISPs and at the DR we have a Meraki MX84 Firewall connected to 2 ISPs. These appliances are setup in a Meraki hub and spoke model- the hub is our main facility and the spoke is the DR facility.

I’m going to be locating several mission critical servers at the DR facility. We want these offsite servers to connect to our main building’s MX100/Cisco switches for regular daily operation. We run a lot of file transfers to these servers and I don’t want to have to use the site to site VPN for file transfers between the buildings.

Also, our main building and the DR facility have dark fiber between them and we’ve already setup a 10G network between the buildings which gives us great file transfer speeds and access to our main buildings switches/network.

All of that said, if our main building goes offline for whatever reason my DR servers will not have a router or connectivity since they are fed through the dark fiber by our main building’s network.

What are the best options for allowing my main facility to go offline and for the DR facility’s gear to “take over”. Basically we want to be able to operate independently from our DR facility with no reliance on the main site should it go down.

Some thoughts I had (whether good or bad)...

1. Dual NICs into each offsite server, 1 from our main building’s network and 1 from our DR facility’s network. I know, not a pretty solution.

2. Setup a Meraki High Availability pair and locate a backup MX100 in our DR facility. If the main building goes down the backup Meraki will take over?

EDIT: The servers I'm placing at the DR facility are not the primary servers, they are clones of the primary servers we have at our main site.

Thanks so much