Posted by Laura Shafer on Tue, Jul 06, 2010 @ 01:04 PM
Maximizing business continuity while protecting critical data can be especially challenging for small and medium sized businesses (SMBs). Most data protection systems are designed for large enterprise environments, which do not work for SMBs. For smaller businesses, resources are especially limited, and administrators cannot afford to pay hundreds of thousands of dollars for expensive continuous data protection (CDP) solutions. But having a server out of commission isn’t an option either.
In addition, many data protection solutions overlook the critical 
component of the recovery time objective (RTO). Your RTO is the maximum amount of time your systems can be out of commission – from when a disruption occurs to the moment your system is available again. Minimizing your RTO helps you avoid the consequences of a long-term break in business continuity.
Unfortunately, most backup and recovery strategies are bound by technological limitations. When your server has many terabytes (TB) of data that must be recovered – not to mention the operating system and applications – it takes many hours to restore everything from the original volume, even at relatively rapid disk speeds.
Cloud computing and off-site replication can help address concerns about data security and help ensure that information is available following a catastrophe. But again, these types of security solutions are often unavailable to SMBs due to their complexity and their costs.
Plus, IT administrators working for SMBs rarely have the time or 
the resources to manage complex backup systems that require extensive certifications or hours of training to understand. But having a clear picture of your backup resources, knowing whether backups are successful and minimizing the resources required for ongoing data protection are imperative.
Download this white paper to learn more about each of these issues, why they are important for SMBs to address and how to resolve them while maximizing business continuity, protecting critical data and minimizing IT resources necessary to accomplish the demands of maintaining Windows servers.
Posted by Laura Shafer on Thu, Jun 03, 2010 @ 02:27 PM
Business won't wait while you try to restore your server following a catastrophic failure. Whether it's a natural disaster that took you out or a RAID router meltdown, it doesn't really matter: you have to get access to your data as quickly as possible and you have to get your business running again.
A new feature in the award-winning StorageCraft ShadowProtect line of backup, disaster recovery and system migration software will help you improve your recovery time objective (RTO) - the maximum amount of time your server can be out of commission. HeadStart Restore™ (HSR) allows you to begin the server recovery process right away, before a disaster.
HSR is available in ShadowProtect ImageManager Enterprise, the newest solution in the ShadowProtect family, and here's how it works. ShadowProtect Server (or ShadowProtect Small Business Server) is taking regular backups of your data; these are snapshots of a point in time on your server. If you want to schedule your backups for every few minutes, you can do that. You can even set the scheduler in ShadowProtect to take incremental backups - just the deltas or small changes to your server - throughout the day.
Now you set ShadowProtect ImageManager Enterprise to create a restore job for a specific server. Once you've set up that job, ShadowProtect ImageManager Enterprise updates that restore job with the incremental changes that are made, so your restore job has all of the data updates that were made throughout the day. Here's the really cool part: when a catastrophe strikes, you won't have to wait hours and hours (or days and days) to get that server online again, because HSR has already been restoring the server. Recovery starts and is ongoing as your backups continue.
To get the server online, it will take just a few more steps. First, you finalize your restore job, which takes just a few seconds. Now you need to get it ready to restore into a virtual machine so you run ShadowProtect's Hardware Independent Restore™ technology. Now you just reboot your server, and you're up and running again. This process takes 15-20 minutes, even if you have a multi-TB volume of data.
There are other new features available in ShadowProtect ImageManager Enterprise, such as replication, which allows you to send your backup images to an off-site location. You can find out more by visiting the ShadowProtect ImageManager Enterprise product page.