Opinion

posted on 18 July 2008 09:25

Murphy’s law, “whatever can go wrong will go wrong, and at the worst possible time, in the worst possible way,” should be the adage by which IT managers working within an SME environment plan their data recovery strategies. Sadly, “that could never happen to me,” seems more appropriate. As a result, most consider the practice of carrying out a daily data backup – usually straight to tape or a network attached device – at the close of play sufficient to protect their company from potential data loss or downtime. 

[An opinion written by Kevin Moreau, General Manager for Acronis UK & Ireland.]
 

Relying on a traditional ‘end of day’ back-up strategy can cause a number of potential problems for SMEs. First of all, if a disaster strikes five minutes before the next backup is due to be made (or 23 hours and 55 minutes after the previous one was carried out) all the new and/or amended data created that day will be lost; that means all emails, invoices, updates to sales spreadsheets, new business pitches and payroll data as well as all the other documents that employees had been working on that day. 
 
Furthermore, it could take several days to recover the previous day’s data – especially if a company is relying on tape (many companies fail to carry out regular checks on the status of their tape cartridges. This means that backups could, potentially, be made to defective media). 

The other issue for companies to consider is this kind of backup strategy would only recover the file data, and couldn’t restore applications or systems settings. Any redeployment would therefore be a labour-intensive and time-consuming procedure, requiring IT managers to find all the original software disks and reset all system preferences by hand on the new hardware. All these issues can cause massive business disruption and potential problems servicing customers and suppliers – which can, in turn, lead to spiralling financial costs and damage to a company’s carefully crafted reputation.
 
There is, however, an alternative. Imaging software has the capability create a master back-up of all a server’s contents onto a second unit (either physical or virtual) and then backup incremental changes to a company’s data during the day. This means that, in the event of a disaster, the recovered data won’t be more a few minutes old.  It also means that there are no potential problems with recoverability because of backup media degradation.  Companies can therefore be more confident in their capability to recover quickly and fully in the event of a disaster.  In addition, imaging software doesn’t just make a copy of a server’s data it also makes a backup of all settings, applications and systems files – allowing the entire contents of a server to be recovered quickly and efficiently. 
 
IT managers may, however, still feel that they need to double-up the number of physical servers to take advantage of the approach offered by imaging software. This isn’t true. Virtualisation technology, once only available to enterprise-sized companies with large IT budgets, is now within reach of SMEs through a number of simple-to-manage and cost effective packages.  In its simplest form, virtualisation technology can be used to create a partition on one single server to form two distinct virtual machines (in the same way that many people partition a disk on their computers).  In this example, one partition of a server would run all the applications as it did before, but the other partition would be used to store a mirror image of the first machine, which could be automatically backed-up by imaging software, as previously described.
 

Both new physical machines would run independently and the virtual partition would protect each half of the server from any viruses, data corruption or loss that occurred on the other.  This means that SMEs can implement an extremely resilient disaster recovery strategy within their budget, and without having to purchase any additional servers. A simple reboot from the hidden partition would restore the entire server back to a known, good working condition in a matter of minutes.

SMEs could also consider going one step further and purchasing an additional server (or two depending on server utilization rates) to house a copy of each of their physical machines – which could be updated on a regular basis by imaging software.  Should a disaster occur, the IT manager could simply boot the virtualized system on the standby server – creating a seamless recovery environment while the company set about purchasing a new physical server. 

It’s worth noting that some of the most advanced imaging software can allow SMEs to recover data to dissimilar servers – this enhances their ability to recover quickly and with fewer constraints.  It also allows SMEs to consider business continuity in its positive sense - enabling them to run planned data migrations, rather than responding reactively to a failed or full-capacity server.  In addition, it enables them to grow their business and easily embrace new physical or virtual technologies as they become available.
 
Today’s imaging software and virtual operating systems can, therefore, offer SMEs a fast, agile and cost-effective data recovery and business continuity solution – one that’s definitely worth investigating before your next physical server fails, or simply needs upgrading.
   
^{[By Kevin Moreau, General Manager for UK & Ireland, Acronis.]}