Backup and recovery: The first line of defense for disaster recovery (page 1 of 2)

But it takes more than well-planned enterprise backup to contain the costs of disaster recovery.

Consider the scenario when a server goes down: revenue, productivity, morale, and customer loyalty are slipping away with every tick of the clock. There is no time to lose - but the whole server restore process is a time-loser. First, find the people with the skills needed to bring the systems back up. Fix or replace the hardware. Install operating systems.

Configure the hardware. Restore and configure the applications. Restore the data. These are demanding, time-consuming tasks. When performed under fire-drill pressure, they often result in errors that affect the integrity of the restore and force your people to start the process over again. And this is a problem that grows: the more servers you acquire, the more costly and challenging it becomes.

Companies usually underestimate the losses they will suffer because of long recovery times. It's not unusual for a complete restore to take days. What would that cost your company?

What is needed here is backup technology that integrates backup and recovery with replication, streamlines and automates recovery, and reduces restore time to minutes. And, as long as we're dreaming, let's make the server restore process so simple that almost no training is required to make it work.


The Building Blocks: Integrated Backup and Recovery
Backup and recovery are equally important building blocks of the disaster recovery process, and when integrated effectively they give SMB operators a formidable, bounce-back response. The backup-and-recovery solution has to be scaled to the size of their operations - not the overkill of a mega-enterprise solution or the frustrating inadequacy of a solution that does too little. Is the cost of the solution rational? Can it backup and restore the valuable data that lives at remote offices and on widely-traveled laptops as well as at the corporate data center?

With these caveats in mind, let's review four basic ways to make a backup-and-recovery solution more powerful and cost-effective:

1. Minimize the duplication window
The real power of an effective backup-and-recovery solution lies in its ability to do its job with the least possible effect on operations. Full-scale backups, formerly a time-consuming necessary evil, can now be replaced in most cases by smaller, less-disruptive, incremental backups that can be seamlessly combined into one. This approach gives you other significant benefits: it reduces tape media usage and provides better indexing, which in turn results in faster restore times.

A backup/recovery solution with a disk-to-disk inline copy feature can consolidate the cost of remote/offsite archiving by allowing for one primary target and up to three secondary targets. Disk staging also shrinks the duplication window. It combines the performance of faster, disk-based storage with the many advantages of tape media.

2. Set up complete offsite management of backups and archives
Managing backup duplication and offsite media can involve procedures that are complex and tedious. But technologies now available can automate the entire process.

They enable you to set policies that control backup duplications - the conditions that trigger them, and the specifics of what data goes where, including the movement of tapes from an offsite vault. While your backup and recovery solution is putting these policies to work, you and your staff will be free to work with other departments to restore business processes.