Backup and disaster recovery were treated as two separate entities till a couple of years ago. But now, all thanks to server virtualization, these two technologies are offered as converged solutions. Follow the article further to know on how is this being made possible
Earlier, backup was about making a recoverable copy of data and disaster recovery was concerned with business continuity, where the idea was to move workloads to new hardware and remote locations in the event of a major disaster.
But as most organizations are now heavily virtualized, a degree of flexibility is obtained, in order to unite these two technologies into one single and easy to manage solution. Nowadays, hypervisors are delivering new capabilities, so that backup vendors have design features that exploit the portability of virtual machines.
To get a clear understanding, consider the instant recovery feature found in many of the newer backup applications. Earlier, restoring a server from backup used to take hours and even days, to complete. But now, with the presence of instant recovery feature, the hypervisor and disk based backup allows the backup copy of a Virtual machine to be brought backup to life almost immediately after downtime.
With the backup virtual machine copy an organization can use the data file as it would use the production virtual machine. A traditional restoration is still eventually required, but it occurs in the background after the backup VM has been brought online.
This serves as a great example as how backups and DR are converging. The backup application is still making point-in-time copies of the VMs, but instant recovery capabilities have reduced the recovery time objective to levels that were previously only attainable with the help of expensive availability features such as failover clustering and virtual machine replication.
StoneFly Backup & Disaster Recovery series of appliances do the same. These appliances offer backup and disaster recovery features in a single easy to manage solution in order to serve all the needs pertaining to physical, virtual server and workstation needs. So, manage all of your backup operations for your datacenter or office with a single central management console.
The backup engine automatically creates backup images of physical servers based on flexible user-defined policy. These images can be restored (bare metal recovery) to the same hardware, to dissimilar hardware to build a new server, or can be mounted as a drive to retrieve an earlier copy of a specific file, folder, etc.
Every backup can also automatically be converted into a Virtual Machine. This feature is quite useful for business continuity for your production environment if a physical server or workstation goes down and needs to be repaired. Replica Virtual Machines can also be used for any testing the user might choose including non-invasive compliance testing.
