Case Study – Online Backup and Disaster Recovery
Executive Summary
This case study demonstrates how a traditional tape backup regime, bloated with multiple tapes and unknown in terms of it’s ability to be restored, can be easily replaced with an complete Online Backup and DR disk imaging solution offering immediate access to backup archives as if they were mapped network drives. In addition the offsite, the Online Backup and DR image can be used to recover your complete servers in a matter of hours.
Customer Profile
An architect’s practice of 90 users had large amounts of data passing through their network and changing on a daily basis. They were backing up to a tape library and finding the process of recovering data, particularly mailboxes, unmanageable.
The Project
Due to the sheer volume of data and the fact that it constantly grows, the practice IT manager was faced with a complicated schedule of tape libraries running daily server backups.
As the total size of data grew, more and more tapes were needed meaning backups were skipped due to overruns. This meant data was getting backed up infrequently and restores would take a long time or not complete at all.
Their existing IT platform was built on Microsoft Windows Server 2012 and Exchange Server 2007 environments.
Off-site tape storage was becoming a costly expense and the recovery of the system in the event of a complete disaster was becoming practically impossible.
Our Solution
1. Onsite Backup
A disk imaging agent was installed on each server, sending complete backup images of all server disks to a local network appliance every 4 hours. This frequency can be set to as often as every 15 minutes.
By taking back up images of servers (or Pc’s) you have a complete copy of your entire system as opposed to indvidiual file selections with a conventional backup, so nothing can be missed.
All applications configurations settings, services and all of the data on the servers is backed up.
The backup process is then fully automated and monitored on a daily basis by a dedicated team of backup and recovery engineers at Online Support.
2. Offsite Disaster Recovery
In addition to a local backup store we provided a backup replica into our secure cloud storage platform where Backups are secured through 128bit or 256bit encryption and password protected.
In the event of a disaster, our hot spare servers are available to recover their network in the cloud. These can then be moved to temporary offices or accessed via the cloud.
The Benefits
Restoring data is literally child’s play – Back up images can quickly be mounted as a separate network drive, allowing fast and easy access to files, folders and mailboxes.
Servers can then be restored quickly to dissimilar hardware or in a cloud environment and accessed remotely over the internet.
The solution has allowed the practice IT manager to finally stop worrying about the ability to restore critica data. This, in turn, has meant he can re-focus his attention on ensuring the IT systems are working correctly and offering a proactive suport service to the Company.
