EXECUTIVE SUMMARY ... 7
ABOUT STORAGECRAFT ... 8
BACKUP FAST, RECOVER FASTER ... 9
THE DEPTH OF DISASTER RECOVERY ... 10
THE BREADTH OF DISASTER RECOVERY ... 11
RAPID RECOVERY FOR WINDOWS SERVERS ... 12
EXECUTIVE SUMMARY
At this point, it should be pretty obvious that we all need some kind of disaster recovery solution. The news headlines are overrun with superstorms, wildfires, tornadoes, and other signs of the wrath of Mother Nature. And if that isn’t enough, the dangers of hardware failure, malicious attacks, power outages, and user error should make disaster recovery a top priority.
But let’s face it. Disasters come in all shapes and sizes, and that doesn’t even include all other IT tasks that are made easier by reliable backups. This means you need flexibility. The traditional view of disaster recovery is that it’s a castle on a hill. You dig in deep, gather stores of food and other resources, build high, thick walls, and man them with loyal soldiers. That way, when the disaster hordes come gibbering over the hills, they can’t break down your defenses and consequently limp back the way they came.
This rather colorful metaphor represents the depth of disaster recovery that most people think of when they hear the “D” word. You identify your critical systems and invest in protecting them. You purchase licenses of the best disaster recovery software you can afford, you take the time to set up everything exactly the way you need it, and you free up the bandwidth you need to replicate your backups to the cloud or some other offsite storage.
This is good. You definitely need this kind of deep coverage in order to keep your business running, but in this world of IT supremacy, sometimes you need breadth, not depth. Sometimes you need to be prepared to move in quickly to protect a machine, or solve a problem, and you need your disaster recovery solution to be flexible enough to follow you wherever you go.
If you’re a managed service provider, this is even more crucial because of your
responsibilities to your clients. Because you have less control over what happens at client sites, you need to be prepared for anything.
In this product brief, we’ll look at some of those situations that require breadth of disaster recovery, rather than depth, and then look at how StorageCraft® ShadowProtect® IT Edition offers that breadth.
THE DEPTH OF DISASTER RECOVERY
When Hurricane Sandy rolled in off the Atlantic, it was out for blood. In order to survive such an event, solution providers in the area needed that castle on the hill. They needed machines that were backed up, replicated, and secure.
The key to making this happen is the sector- or image-based backup solution. By capturing the state of machines on the sector level, solution providers can be sure that when the barbarians are at the gate, the solutions providers are ready and able to repel any damage. In other words, they know that they can at any time return a client’s machine to the state it was in before the disaster.
For something like a hurricane, it’s important to copy those backup images to a remote location. For smaller, more local disasters, using local backups is usually the best, but you can’t ever be sure what kinds of disasters may try to take you out. Natural disasters are certainly on the top of that list, but power outages, fires, and other accidents can force you into an offsite recovery. When that happens, a smart solution provider is prepared. Of course, keeping current and quality backups of multiple businesses and their multiple machines in multiple locations is challenging too, so you also want a way of managing
those backups. For one thing, backups take up space, so you’re going to have to manage that, but there’s also the question of whether the backups will even work. Testing is a crucial part of any disaster recovery plan, because honestly, when it comes time to recover, you can’t be worrying about your backups. You’ll have enough to worry about. And when it does come time to recover, you need options. You need to be able to get your business operational as quickly as possible, even in the worst circumstances, and you need to be able to access and actually use your data. In modern IT, this means diverse virtualization options and maybe even the cloud.
These are the kinds of things you prepare for. These are the technologies you invest in to build your castle on the hill. But sometimes the disaster is something you didn’t expect. Sometimes it’s something that, no matter how hard you try, you can’t prepare for. And sometimes, it’s not a disaster at all yet, unless something goes wrong.
Joe Hillis, the operations director for the Information Technology Disaster Resource Center (ITDRC), knows something about the need for breadth. His organization travels around the United States offering IT support to areas hit hard by natural disasters.
Joe never has the luxury of traditional disaster recovery. When he gets to a site, he doesn’t know what he’s going to find. He needs a disaster recovery solution that allows him to jump onto a system, back it up in a way that makes it usable for recovery, and then move on.
You may not always be in the do or die situations the ITDRC encounters, but that doesn’t mean there aren’t times when you need to back up one or more machines that you don’t have licenses for. Or maybe it’s a new client and you want to get them covered quickly while you figure out the best way to get their castle set up.
Some machines simply aren’t worth the trouble or cost to maintain, but they may house legacy information or software that can’t be lost. You don’t want to go through the hassle (or cost) of paying for a license and installing a full blown disaster recovery solution on a machine like that, but what do you do about the data? At the same time, some systems are too fragile for the installation of new software, but again, you can’t just ignore them. Or, maybe you’re like many solution providers whose clients have a variety of machines, both physical and virtual, from several different manufacturers. You want to transfer data around, but the differences in machine type make it challenging. In fact, any migration is a challenge, regardless of the kind of machine you’re one.
These are just some examples of the kinds of situations you run into that require a different kind of disaster recovery solution. It needs to be robust enough to provide rock solid backups and easy recoveries, but it also needs to be flexible enough to handle those situations that don’t fit inside the box.
THE BREADTH OF DISASTER RECOVERY
StorageCraft® ShadowProtect® IT Edition is that solution. It will back up your Windows servers quickly and easily, and recover rapidly in the event of a disaster.
ShadowProtect IT Edition is a fast and reliable disk-based backup that captures full backups of your production system without the need to install any software or drivers. These backups include the operating system, applications, services, configuration settings, and all your data.
With ShadowProtect IT Edition, you can back up an unlimited number of servers and workstations. This means that it is the same cost for you to backup and restore five servers as it is for you to backup and restore 500 or 5,000. Think about how easy and cost effective that makes the migration of a client’s office from physical to virtual systems. Licensing for ShadowProtect IT Edition is subscription-based, so you pay to use the software for a specific amount of time. You can buy a subscription license for two weeks, one month, three months, or one year. During this time, you can back up, copy, clone, or restore an unlimited amount of systems.
ShadowProtect IT Edition includes StorageCraft Hardware Independent Restore™ technology which makes restoring to new hardware or a virtual environment fast and easy. Recover your backup image to new hardware (bare metal recovery), to different hardware, and/or to a wide range of supported hypervisors. You have plenty of options to choose from when restoring an entire system from a backup image.
ShadowProtect IT Edition allows you to recover rapidly because there are no extra steps for recovery. After repairing your server, you restore your ShadowProtect backup image and you’re ready to go—the server operating system, applications, services, and data are all contained in the backup image file.
For granular recovery of individual files and folders, simply mount a backup image file and then quickly browse to the files you need. If you want, you can drag and drop folders to your production server or leave the backup image mounted to allow users to find the files they need.
BACKUP FAST, RECOVER FASTER
ShadowProtect IT Edition gives you the breadth in your disaster recovery that you need.
ShadowProtect IT Edition eliminates backup windows and lengthy recovery processes. With ShadowProtect IT Edition, full backups happen immediately without any software installation so there is no impact on business performance and everything including your operating system, applications, and data are protected.
ShadowProtect IT Edition takes disaster recovery to the next level by allowing you to back up and restore an unlimited number of systems. With the ability to quickly recover to multiple environments, ShadowProtect IT Edition makes migrating each and every one of your servers from physical to virtual environments a snap, dramatically reducing the amount of time and resources required to complete your migration projects.
Every minute you lose in recovery time is income and productivity lost. Minimize recovery time and you maximize your profits.
For additional information about ShadowProtect IT Edition, please visit: www.StorageCraft. com/ShadowIT.
RECOVER-
ABILIT
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Copyright ©2013 StorageCraft Technology Corporation. All rights reserved. This publication is for informational purposes only. STORAGECRAFT MAKES NO WARRANTIES, EXPRESSED OR IMPLIED, IN THIS PUBLICATION. StorageCraft, ShadowProtect, ShadowControl, intelligentFTP, ShadowStream, and HeadStart Restore names and logos are registered trademarks and ImageReady, CMD, VirtualBoot, Hardware Independent Restore, Recover-Ability, and ShadowCloud names and logos are trademarks of StorageCraft Technology Corporation. All other brands and product names are trademarks or registered trademarks of their respective owners.
ABOUT STORAGECRAFT
At StorageCraft®, the goal of complete disaster recovery drives everything we do. Our StorageCraft® Recover-Ability™ solution is an end-to-end, best-in-class backup and disaster recovery solution that is both fast and reliable.
STORAGECRAFT RECOVER-ABILITY
It starts with a good backup. Our award-winning
StorageCraft® ShadowProtect® takes complete, pristine
images of your machines, including all your operating systems, applications, services, and settings.
It then records changes at the sector level, so you always have an up-to-date copy of every machine in your IT environment, whether it’s a critical server or an employee laptop, physical or virtual. We even work with specialized database servers, like SQL, SharePoint, or Exchange. You can get granular recovery in Exchange with ShadowProtect Granular Recovery for Exchange. You have complete control over the frequency of your backups and you can set rules for consolidation and retention to manage your precious storage space using
StorageCraft® ImageManager.
Plus, with StorageCraft® ShadowControl® CMD™ you can monitor the machines in your backup environment from a single interface and get alerts when a machine is running
out of space, when a backup doesn’t happen, or when any of a variety of conditions you specify is met.
We also give you tools to test your backups using StorageCraft®
VirtualBoot™ and
StorageCraft®
Image-Ready™ technologies,
which gives you confidence that your
data is safe and that a disaster won’t shut you down or hold you up.
Then, we make it easy to replicate your backup images offsite to a StorageCraft® Cloud Services site or to your own offsite location so you can always have your data close when you need it and at a good safe distance when a disaster comes.
When it does, you can launch your backups as virtual machines with VirtualBoot or mount them as drives for complete, granular access to your data.
Or you can pre-stage the recovery of a local backup image in a virtual machine with our patented
StorageCraft® HeadStart Restore® technology, so if your
main server blows up, you can be up and running in minutes. You can even virtualize your data offsite in our cloud so even Mother Nature can’t keep you down. Then, you can rebuild your infrastructure and recover to all kinds of machines, physical or virtual, using our
StorageCraft Hardware® Independent Restore™ technology
or ShadowProtect IT Edition.
You can’t be sure what kind of disaster will strike you next, but with the StorageCraft Recover-Ability solution, you can be sure it doesn’t matter. You’ll be just fine.
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