I Have My Backups, Now What?

During a recent conversation with a customer, I shared a quick, low-cost way to speed up the recovery process.

You see, we at RenovoData have their data backups but they are still running all their OSEs (operating system environments) on bare metal servers. What this tells me is that sometimes people get busy and collapse two different levels of protection. In this case, we are talking about data protection versus server recovery. Having the data backed up provides the ability to recover, but the speed of recovery is impeded by the process of recovering the server itself.

Server recovery includes…

Locating another server, loading the correct Operating System license, running patches, rebooting and loading more patches (sometimes several times), then locating and installing the applications, and finally restoring the data. From start to finish, this process may take several (sometimes stressful) hours to complete. This is a prime example of how a little prevention now can save a business owner’s headache in the future.

Here is a great shortcut for disaster recovery… Virtual Clones of each production server.

You can pay for an image-based backup solution, or you can download the free version of VMware and the VM converter tools and create a clone yourself. If you have a clone, you can boot it and restore data from the last backup. This will get your company get back in business while you get parts for your ailing production hardware. In addition, RenovoData can store a clone of your server in our Archive Storage for low-cost insurance against site loss.

Don’t miss: Follow-up article I can no longer tolerate application downtime, what should I do?