There's an old saying in IT circles that goes something like this:
"Backups are easy...it's the restores that are difficult".
(1) If you think that saying is a bit of a joke, you obviously haven't been in the situation where you desperately inserted a critical backup tape and found it wouldn't read. It's not all that funny... but it's remarkably common.
(2) If you think that your current backup regime is adequate, then you might like to ask whoever is doing these backups this question: "Are you prepared to guarantee the restorability of my backups?" If they don't answer "yes"...then what's the point?
(3) If you think you have a true disaster recovery plan, think through this: In a true disaster, your server is gone. It's 99% certain that you will have to use whatever server you can find, wherever. Will your backup restore to different hardware?
(4) And when the chips are utterly down, even if your backup works, how long do you really think it's going to take you to rebuild that server (or maybe even multiple servers) so they are working perfectly? And what is the true cost of that, measured in downtime, man-hours and perhaps other less tangible costs?
ICO Backup is Serious Backup
(1) We guarantee we'll be able to read a backup.
(2) We guarantee we'll restore it for you.
(3) We guarantee that we can restore a complete, working server to different hardware.
(4) An in a best case scenario, we can restore a full server, operating system and all, in less than an hour.
What's The Secret?
ICO is using an old idea with a new twist. It's a "snapshot". But it doesn't create a physical copy of all the data on a drive. Instead, it constructs pointers that map files and directories to specific disk blocks. That process is often called copy-on-write technology and it's been around in the mainframe and VMS world for about 40 years. It's just been updated and rewritten for the Windows environment. The snapshot freezes the view of the drive as we're backing it up.
As a disaster recovery technology, it can provide lightning fast physical or virtual restores. It works with every Windows server or workstation, and can be used to restore one or more disk partitions despite no operating system being available; even to a larger capacity disk drive right out of the box. We ensure that open files are backed up safely during the image process. We can even encrypt them using Blowfish Technology.
What that means, in short, is that true dissimilar hardware capability has finally arrived. For example, if a one processor server with 100GB SATA hard disks fails, it can be restored to a two processor server with 143GB SCSI disks.
We can also offer physical-to-virtual (P2V) based disaster recoveries. This allows us to recover a server and emulate it virtually. We can create as many new virtual environments as required on our host virtual servers, which we keep in our secondary Disaster Recovery Data Centre. (Please ask us about this service).
We also support virtual-to-virtual (V2V) and virtual-to-physical (V2P) recoveries, providing users with every available virtual disaster recovery option.
What's it Going to Cost You?
Well, the solution above will cost you $40 a month for us to fully manage, guarantee and restore the backup if need be.
And another $47 a month for a typical 10GB of space on the local NAS, which is then written weekly to Tape and sent offsite to secure storage in a vault on the other side of Sydney (where we keep three months of these weekly offsite tapes).
If that seems like a reasonable price, it is. But there is a small catch. To achieve all this, we need to have some software on your server that interfaces with our management console. The people who wrote this software would like $895US per server for it. You will own the software and can even move it to another server. (There is also a "system state and file" version of this software for $245US).
And think about this; without even considering its true purpose, we can assure you that the snapshot software will pay for itself the first time you ever have to clone a server.
And in a disaster, the combination of your software and the ICO backup regime will be priceless.
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