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Surveys of small and medium-size companies indicate this: for an increasing number of mission-critical applications, recoveries that stretch into hours can impact business revenues just as badly as recoveries that – just a few years ago – took a day or more. The need for faster recoveries has risen following server-room restructurings where administrators deploying new virtual machines and they worry about backing them up with the same comprehensive solution they previously applied to backing up physical machines. The potential for a failed disaster recovery is increased when backup protection is inadequate. That is forcing administrators to reconsider their current backup solutions, and evaluating whether or not their current recovery scheme is robust enough to survive a disaster. One of the prime issues is the large number of tape-based backup systems, which have a tough time keeping up with today’s ‘on all the time’ application server requirements. Tape on the way out as a backup medium. Traditional backup schemes have for decades included tape, but that is rapidly changing. File-and-folder tape backup schedules that could stretch for hours without impacting productivity are now butting up against uptime requirements that can, in many cases require servers to be up 24 hours a day except for planned machine updates. Disk-based imaging technology is the rising star of server backups because it answers this need for speed, able to accomplish faster backups and speed recoveries. Virtualization is boosting the move to all-disk backups as the number of mission-critical application services increases. At the same time, plentiful, cheap online storage offers another reason to make the transition from tape to disk for anything but archival storage, and even then, the cost difference can be minimal enough for many companies to choose disk for all of their data. Disk-based Systems Ideal When Used Across Virtual, Physical and Cloud To meet today’s shortened recovery time objectives, an organization has to be able to operate smoothly across virtual, physical and – increasingly – cloud resources. Even companies with a significant commitment to virtualization continue to depend on physical machines that aren’t necessarily going anywhere soon. Those machines often include legacy applications as well as mission-critical applications including Exchange Server and domain controllers. In such a hybrid environment, it makes sense to consider an all-inclusive solution that supports multiple platforms under a unified user interface, and that solution is most easily found with a disk-imaging solution able to achieve the fast recoveries that today’s businesses need. But disk imaging is not just about faster recovery times. It’s also an important time saver for bare metal rebuilds and server replication, both of which can be completed in a fraction of the time required for manual rebuilds. Look for the ability to recover any available hardware (hardware-agnostic) because it’s less costly than the traditional approach where an organization has to purchase and maintain identical spares. To try out unified, cross-platform backup and replication software from AppAssure, please click here for a free trial download
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