Centralized and Offsite Backup

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Centralized and Offsite Backup

1601 Trapelo Road Waltham, MA 02451 1.866.WANSync

www.xosoft.com

Mitigate Risk and Lower Costs - Let Your DR Replica Perform Offsite Backups

December 2005

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The Value Proposition

Mitigate risk and lower costs by letting your disaster recovery replica server double as a server for performing an offsite backup. XOsoft’s patented Assured Recovery technology combined with state-of-the-art replication allows a backup to be performed on an offsite replica server using the same application-based validation procedures as would occur on the production server, without the additional costs or security risks of transporting the backup to the DR facility.

For branch offices, businesses can accrue a double benefit by centralizing the offsite backups of multiple branch offices at a single facility to significantly reduce the need for sophisticated IT support at every location.

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Description of the Solution

Financial / Executive Impact

Disaster recovery and business continuance capabilities are increasingly critical for businesses today. According to a study by accounting firm McGladrey and Pullen, 43% of companies that experience a disaster never re-open and 29% close within two years. Of those that do manage to survive, the long-term financial impact can be tremendous. As Figure 1 illustrates for publicly traded companies, an organization that does not respond effectively to a crisis faces a double penalty in the direct impact of the crisis and in a subsequent crisis of confidence by investors.

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Understanding the Options

Your ability to respond effectively to a disaster depends on the depth of protection that your systems offer. For application and data servers, depth of protection essentially means maintaining multiple layers of protection. Maintaining a local backup, for example, lays the foundation for an effective disaster recovery response, but by itself it is inadequate: the restore process is slow, so that recovery times are high; the frequency of backup is low, so that many hours of data may potentially be lost; and having the backup stored locally means that there is no protection from loss of the entire site.

Adding an off-site copy of the backup certainly addresses the last limitation, but it only exacerbates the previous two. An offsite backup is only going to be slower to restore and older than an onsite one. In addition, maintaining an offsite backup introduces new costs and risks associated with transporting backup tapes to a secondary location. For companies with multiple sites, even maintaining a local backup can be a significant cost since backups must be managed at each local site individually. It is neither cost-effective to maintain sophisticated IT personnel at every location, nor is it safe to place the burden on non-IT staff for whom performing and verifying backups are unwanted and onerous tasks. As a result, these tasks are as likely to be skipped as not, putting critical corporate data at risk.

Accelerating Time to Recovery with Minimal Data Loss

Real-time data replication is a mature disaster recovery technology that can offer another layer of protection, one which addresses all three of the major limitations of local backup. An over-the-WAN asynchronous replication product like XOsoft’s WANSync provides the ability to maintain an always-up-to-date copy of your critical application data at a secure secondary site. Because the data at the secondary site typically lags only a few seconds behind the production data as long as bandwidth is sufficient to replicate application data updates (i.e., only changes to the data), potential data loss is minimized. Finally, with the addition of an automated client failover solution like that provided with WANSyncHA, the time-to-recovery can be reduced from hours or days to just a few minutes, typically the time required to start the protected application, such as Microsoft Exchange, Microsoft SQL Server, or Oracle, on the secondary server.

It is very important to understand, however, that replication and automated failover are powerful technologies to be considered in addition to local and remote backup – they cannot be considered substitutes. Nevertheless, it seems natural to try to use the remote copy of the data at a secondary site to perform an offsite tape backup.

Validate the replica server environment without disrupting IT production systems

Unfortunately, replicated data does not naturally lend itself to use for backups or snapshots since there is no way to ensure that the data is in a consistent, backup-ready state at the time a backup is taken. On the production server, this is accomplished by directly involving the application – the application is generally put into “backup state”, which means that it applies any accumulated changes to its internal database and then begins accumulating new changes in a separate location while the backup or snapshot is taking place. The unique patented technology in XOsoft’s Assured Recovery product changes this.

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Assured Recovery is designed to allow in-depth testing of the recoverability of the application on a replica server without any disruption to the production server, to the replication process, or to the automated failover protection mechanisms that are in place in case of a disaster. In Assured Recovery, application of replicated changes on the replica data is temporarily suspended and the application (Exchange, SQL Server or Oracle) is started and then made available for scripted or manual testing. In effect, Assured Recovery allows the replica server to “remember” the state of application data exactly as it was when application of changes was paused so that, after testing, the data can returned to that state and application of changes continued where they left off.

Utilizing the Replica Server in the Backup Role

In addition to supporting full disaster recovery testing without disruption, Assured Recovery also has built-in mechanisms for performing a backup or snapshot of your application data in precisely the same way that it is performed on your production server. On Windows 2003, snapshot capability using Microsoft’s Volume Shadow Copy Service is also built into Assured Recovery, and on all platforms the product supports registering a script that will perform a full backup or snapshot either while the application is online or after it has been shut down. In either case, the application may be backed up from a fully validated state that is known to be backup-ready.

With replication and AR, you can add two layers of protection to your disaster recovery capability at once: remote replication for disaster recovery with automated failover for business continuance and fully validated offsite backup. In the case of branch offices, this same mechanism can be used to create a backup replica at a central site, with centrally managed backups, for a double benefit.

Example Scenario

The following sequence of illustrations shows how Assured Recovery operates. First, replication of changes begins to spool on the replica server; note that replication continues and the production server is protected from disaster throughout testing and backup. Next, SQL Server is started on the replica server and basic testing is performed, in this case, only verification that SQL starts and that databases properly mount, although additional tests may be inserted easily. Once testing is complete, the backup script is triggered. Upon completion, SQL is shut down, the VSS snapshot is performed, and application of replicated changes is resumed.

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Figure 1: Replication of changes begins to spool on the replica server.

Figure 2: SQL Server is started on the replica server and basic testing is performed.

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Figure 3: Testing is completed, clean shut-down of database occurs, backup script is triggered and VSS snapshot is performed.

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Figure 5: Application of replicated changes resumes

Implementing the Solution

Configuring Assured Recovery is clear-cut process, and is thoroughly documented in the Assured Recovery chapter of the WANSync User Guide. To implement the kinds of integrated backup or snapshot solutions described here is very straightforward.

On Windows Server 2003, you may create and manage VSS snapshots of your application data directly through the Assured Recovery configuration panel and the VSS_Util command-line utility. To further integrate with any standard backup product, a simple script may be written which triggers the backup process and captures and returns the status afterward. This script is then registered directly within Assured Recovery, as documented in the User Guide, and the status will be reported via the normal WANSync reporting methods.

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Other XOsoft Products

XOsoft offers several other products to protect access to your critical data and applications, as well as to add value through fast and completely flexible content delivery. Please check out our website or contact a XOsoft representative for more information.

• WANSync for Disaster Recovery • WANSync for Content Delivery • Enterprise Rewinder

A 14 day trial evaluation of the software is available for download at:

http://www.xosoft.com/download/index.shtml

Contact Information

North America (1.866.WANSync) International

Headquarters New York _{West Coast} Israel

1601 Trapelo Road Waltham, MA 02451 Tel: 781.419.5200 Fax: 781.419.5252 36th_floor 250 West 34th Street New York, NY 10119 Tel: 212-849-6838 Fax: 212-849-6901 19925 Stevens Creek Blvd. Cupertino, CA 95014-2358 Tel: 408-725-7134 Fax: 408-725-7144

5 Menahem Begin Ave. P.O. Box 31

Beit Dagan 50250, Israel

Tel: +972-3-9775560 Fax: +972-3-9775561

Centralized and Offsite Backup