Posts Tagged ‘HeadStart Restore’

In the last article, we focused on the features in ShadowProtect ImageManager™ and how they can help you manage your backup image files. In April, StorageCraft released an enhanced version of the product called ShadowProtect ImageManager Enterprise™. It has all of the features in the standard version: consolidation of backup image files, file verification as well as notification settings.

But ShadowProtect ImageManager Enterprise also includes two additional features that make it much easier to improve business continuity and lower your recovery time objective (RTO), the maximum amount of time your server systems can be out of commission. These features are HeadStart Restore™ and replication.

HeadStart Restore – or 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.

First, you need to set up ShadowProtect Server (or ShadowProtect Small Business Server) to take regular backups of your data, then ShadowProtect will take snapshots of a point in time on your server. You can even set the scheduler in ShadowProtect to take incremental backups – just the deltas or small changes to your server – throughout the day.

The next thing you do is 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.

The other key feature in ShadowProtect ImageManager Enterprise is replication. Now you can send your backup images to an off-site location so that your backups are secure in case your primary location is wiped out by flood, fire or another sort of catastrophe.

You’ll want to note that  ShadowProtect ImageManager Enterprise is licensed per server. So one license allows you to perform one HeadStart Restore job, one on-site replication and one off-site replication.

You can find out more by visiting the ShadowProtect ImageManager Enterprise product page. Included there is a product overview which explains just what it is and how it works.

StorageCraft released a brand new product this morning, ShadowProtect ImageManager Enterprise™ 4.0. ShadowProtect ImageManager Enterprise is an add-on feature for ShadowProtect Server™ and ShadowProtect Small  Business Server™. It has a few more features than the basic product, ShadowProtect ImageManager, which comes with all of the ShadowProtect™ products.

The revolutionary feature in ShadowProtect ImageManager Enterprise is HeadStart Restore™, which allows you to simultaneously restore your server backup images, while you’re still backing up your server.

“System restores often involve terabytes of data, which means a realistic RTO is hours,” said Scott Barnes, chief technology officer at StorageCraft. “With HeadStart Restore, we’ve drastically reduced the time it takes to recover your systems and data because most of the system and data recovery occurred before there was even a failure.”

With HeadStart Restore — or HSR — you set up a system restore “job” in ShadowProtect ImageManager Enterprise to begin the server recovery right away.

ShadowProtect Server continues to back up any incremental changes that are made on the server, which also get sent to the HeadStart Restore job and applied. The Lag Time Apply feature in HSR also allows administrators to delay incremental changes – to account for corruption from malware or a virus. By default, this is set to three days, but this can be changed to suit IT requirements.

In the event of a disaster, the administrator finalizes the restore – which usually takes seconds to apply the incremental updates – then prepares the virtual environment, runs ShadowProtect’s Hardware Independent Restore™ technology, reboots the server, and is back up and running. The elapsed time is several minutes, not several hours. So you’re able to restore a server with even multi-terabytes of data in 15-20 minutes.

“Being able to get a jump on the restore process with HeadStart Restore is a tremendous asset for our business and for our customers,” said Shawn Massey, director of NetAssist at Camera Corner/Connecting Point Computer Center. “We’re able to get servers up and running in a fraction of the time it used to take. Downtime is expensive, and knowing that it won’t take all day or all weekend to rebuild a server is invaluable.”

You can find all kinds of additional information about StorageCraft ShadowProtect ImageManager Enterprise 4.0 on the ShadowProtect product pages, including data sheets and white papers. Or e-mail sales@storagecraft.com.