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Mitigate risk and lower costs by letting your disaster recovery replica server double as a server for performing an offsite backup. XOsoft's patented Assured Recovery technology combined with state-of-the-art replication allows a backup to be performed on an offsite replica server using the same application-based validation procedures as would occur on the production server, without the additional costs or security risks of transporting the backup to the DR facility.
For branch offices, businesses can accrue a double benefit by centralizing the offsite backups of multiple branch offices at a single facility to significantly reduce the need for sophisticated IT support at every location.
Description of the Solution
Financial / Executive Impact
Disaster recovery and business continuance capabilities are increasingly critical for businesses today. According to a study by accounting firm McGladrey and Pullen, 43% of companies that experience a disaster never re-open and 29% close within two years. Of those that do manage to survive, the long-term financial impact can be tremendous. As Figure 1 illustrates for publicly traded companies, an organization that does not respond effectively to a crisis faces a double penalty in the direct impact of the crisis and in a subsequent crisis of confidence by investors.
Understanding the Options
Your ability to respond effectively to a disaster depends on the depth of protection that your systems offer. For application and data servers, depth of protection essentially means maintaining multiple layers of protection. Maintaining a local backup, for example, lays the foundation for an effective disaster recovery response, but by itself it is inadequate: the restore process is slow, so that recovery times are high; the frequency of backup is low, so that many hours of data may potentially be lost; and having the backup stored locally means that there is no protection from loss of the entire site.
Adding an off-site copy of the backup certainly addresses the last limitation, but it only exacerbates the previous two. An offsite backup is only going to be slower to restore and older than an onsite one. In addition, maintaining an offsite backup introduces new costs and risks associated with transporting backup tapes to a secondary location.
For companies with multiple sites, even maintaining a local backup can be a significant cost since backups must be managed at each local site individually. It is neither cost-effective to maintain sophisticated IT personnel at every location, nor is it safe to place the burden on non-IT staff for whom performing and verifying backups are unwanted and onerous tasks. As a result, these tasks are as likely to be skipped as not, putting critical corporate data at risk.
Accelerating Time to Recovery with Minimal Data Loss
Real-time data replication is a mature disaster recovery technology that can offer another layer of protection, one which addresses all three of the major limitations of local backup. An over-the-WAN asynchronous replication product like XOsoft's WANSync provides the ability to maintain an always-up-to-date copy of your critical application data at a secure secondary site. Because the data at the secondary site typically lags only a few seconds behind the production data as long as bandwidth is sufficient to replicate application data updates (i.e., only changes to the data), potential data loss is minimized. Finally, with the addition of an automated client failover solution like that provided with WANSyncHA, the time-to-recovery can be reduced from hours or days to just a few minutes, typically the time required to start the protected application, such as Microsoft Exchange, Microsoft SQL Server, or Oracle, on the secondary server.
It is very important to understand, however, that replication and automated failover are powerful technologies to be considered in addition to local and remote backup ? they cannot be considered substitutes. Nevertheless, it seems natural to try to use the remote copy of the data at a secondary site to perform an offsite tape backup.
Validate the replica server environment without disrupting IT production systems
Unfortunately, replicated data does not naturally lend itself to use for backups or snapshots since there is no way to ensure that the data is in a consistent, backup-ready state at the time a backup is taken.
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