StorageCraft ShadowProtect
That tag-line is quoted by almost every backup solution available in the world today. Most of them offer only backup functionality, and when it comes to disaster recovery they fall short.
While data backups are important, disaster recovery is generally about a lot more than getting your most recent data backups restored. What is often overlooked is the downtime caused due to rebuilding the actual systems that the data is stored on.
The often overlooked ‘peripherals’ like OS installation, software installation and service restoration such as domain controllers and mail servers can lead to days of downtime.
Disaster recovery solutions
One possible option to avoid a lengthy downtime in a case of disaster recovery is to use a system like ShadowProtect. ShadowProtect by StorageCraft affords system administrators a way to restore Windows based servers to point in time state – independent of hardware.
While other products are available to ghost-image machines, there are not many that can ghost a machine while it is running.
ShadowProtect does just that, it makes an image of your server on a bit level and stores this image on a designated drive. You can specify periodical incremental backups of this image to be done which greatly reduces the needed backup storage and shortens the time taken to make the various images.
Unique to ShadowProtect, the image can be booted on a virtual machine and used immediately as a temporary stand in for a broken server while a new one is readied, directly booted on new hardware and even edited and scanned for viruses before being rolled out into a production environment.
Real world testing
During tests, ShadowProtect imaged an 80Gigabyte data set in minutes, and restored this on a separate machine ready for use.
Besides the basic system imaging and booting functionality ShadowProtect also offers remote accessible boot disks which allows users to restore a server from attached storage while the operator is connected over the Internet, rebuilding of complete system volumes within minutes and migration to and from RAID sets and between different RAID levels. It can also migrate between virtual and “real” servers.
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