Replicating a replication

[ocmcomms]

Afternoon all,

I'm hoping someone can shed some light on this query as its a bit of an unusual scenario

We have a DSS6 up95
We purchased a second unit to replicate onto
However due to the lousy spec of the SANS forced upon us by head office the replication took forever and basically made the primary SAN unusable to the point the VMs fell over!
Anyway after much downtime (shutting all VMs down over the weekend while replication was active etc )we finally had a replicated copy of the primary SAN!

We have now cut free and decided to invest in a proper spec SAN
My thought was to replicate from the second SAN onto the new one (to minimize downtime) and then just have a small copy from the current primary SAN to finish off

First fail was installing DSS7 on the new SAN which flat refused to replicate
So I decided to run DSS6 off a USB thumb drive temporarily while the data replicates and this appears to work fine

In summary
1. Replicate SAN 1 --> SAN2
2. Then replicate SAN 2 --> SAN3
3. Finish up by replicating SAN1 --> SAN3

So my question is this
Will this work? Or will step 3 refuse to run because there is already data on SAN3
And can I expect to then install DSS7 and actually use the data replicated?

Any feedback (or alternate suggestions) welcome

Ben

[To-M]

Ok first keep in mind that the Volume Replication is like a RAID 1, so if your going to replication keep in mind there is only a Source and a Destination. See if this helps to understand better.

1. Replicate SAN 1 (Source) --> SAN2 (Destination)
2. Then replicate SAN 2 (Stop and delete the Replication then set the Destination to Source and recreate the task to point to SAN3) --> SAN3 (Set the volume to Destination and set the IP to SAN 2)
3. Finish up by replicating SAN1 --> SAN3 - Here is where SAN 1 sent the data SAN 2 so all the data on SAN 1 was sent to SAN 2 to replicate to SAN 3 as the new Destination.