how to recover centera without replication

Right, but if we stop writing to the primary centera when we stop the replication (stop the move jobs from diskxtender and keeping email archive on our clariion), both centeras in theory should have the same info. Then in case of a incident/DR scenario we could reconnect the standby server. Does this logic make sense, and what else should i be mindful of in this situation.

By disconnecting replication anything written to the primary Centera after replication is disabled will not exist on the DR Centera. The DR CNTERA WILL BE A "point in time' copy of what exists on the primary Centera.

Automatic failover will not occur.

If you stop writing to the primary then all you need to do is ensure that the replication queue is empty prior to disabling replication.

Aurelio,

I think the following statement is what is confusing "Our primary centera will still be active for the next year (we use it for emc emailxtender/diskxtender archive storage)"

I think your intention is to not write any more data to it, but just to keep it active for read-only purposes. As Dennis mentioned, you just need to ensure replication is paused once the Replication Queue on the primary Centera is empty, before removing the replica from your environment.

I believe that your concern is then, how to recover if somehow the primary Centera goes off-line. If your "stand-by" Centera will be the same as your current "replica" Centera, then YES, you only need to point the Application to that box, by changing the IP Addresses.

NOTE: Please note that DXW does not permit changes on the IP addresses for the Centera connection string and it is recommended to use DNS Aliases instead. If these best practices were not followed, you will have to work with your network team to assign the same IP addresses to the replica centera (your "standby" Centera.

Hope this helps.