Archive for June 2010
Maximizing Business Continuity
Maximizing business continuity while minimizing business disruption can be especially challenging for small and medium sized businesses (SMBs) following a server failure. Resources are limited, so there isn’t a lot of help to get systems back online. Having a server out of commission is never pleasant, but the consequences of business disruption are grimmer for SMBs than they are for large enterprises that can disperse the effect of a server meltdown.
That’s why it is vitally important to keep your Recovery Time Objective (RTO) at a level that helps you avoid the serious consequences of a break in the flow of your daily business. Your RTO is the maximum amount of time your systems can be out of commission – from when a disruption occurs to the moment your system is available again. Minimizing your RTO helps you avoid the consequences of a long-term break in business continuity.
Unfortunately, most backup and recovery strategies are bound by technological limitations. When your server has many terabytes (TB) of data that must be recovered – not to mention the operating system and applications – it takes many hours to restore everything from the original volume, even at relatively rapid disk speeds.
In addition, the promise of virtualization may seem attractive for SMBs, particularly since virtualization can help address limitations on resources. But the reality of the cost and time expenditures to transfer data to virtual servers, in addition to the complexity of virtualization technology, makes this prohibitive.
Finally, upgrading to a new Windows server can frustrate IT staff with its complexity and potential for disaster. The migration process can place a heavy load on SMBs with limited IT resources.
Download this white paper to learn more about each of these issues, why they are important for SMBs to address and how to resolve them while maximizing business continuity and minimizing IT resources necessary to accomplish the demands of maintaining Windows servers.
Improve Your Recovery Time Objective with HeadStart Restore
Business won’t wait while you try to restore your server following a catastrophic failure. So a new feature in the award-winning StorageCraft ShadowProtect line of backup, disaster recovery and system migration software will help you improve your recovery time objective (RTO) – the maximum amount of time your server can be out of commission. HeadStart Restore™ (HSR) allows you to begin the server recovery process right away, before a disaster. Whether it’s a natural disaster that took you out or a RAID router meltdown, it doesn’t really matter. You have to get access to your data as quickly as possible and you have to get your business running again.
HSR is available in ShadowProtect ImageManager Enterprise, the newest solution in the ShadowProtect family, and here’s how it works. ShadowProtect Server (or ShadowProtect Small Business Server) is taking regular backups of your data; these are snapshots of a point in time on your server. If you want to schedule your backups for every few minutes, you can do that. You can even set the scheduler in ShadowProtect to take incremental backups – just the deltas or small changes to your server – throughout the day.
Now you set ShadowProtect ImageManager Enterprise to create a restore job for a specific server. Once you’ve set up that job, ShadowProtect ImageManager Enterprise updates that restore job with the incremental changes that are made, so your restore job has all of the data updates that were made throughout the day. Here’s the really cool part: when a catastrophe strikes, you won’t have to wait hours and hours (or days and days) to get that server online again, because HSR has already been restoring the server. Recovery starts and is ongoing as your backups continue.
To get the server online, it will take just a few more steps. First, you finalize your restore job, which takes just a few seconds. Now you need to get it ready to restore into a virtual machine so you run ShadowProtect’s Hardware Independent Restore™ technology. Now you just reboot your server, and you’re up and running again. This process takes 15-20 minutes, even if you have a multi-TB volume of data.
There are other new features available in ShadowProtect ImageManager Enterprise, such as replication, which allows you to send your backup images to an off-site location. You can find out more by visiting the ShadowProtect ImageManager Enterprise product page.