Double-Take Software

Trying to determining what data is important, why choose? Select it All! Having a hard time trying to get your business departments to identify what is the most critical data to backup? This is may be the most common problem for IT managers, not only trying to extract that information but then setting up the backup solution to only capture the data required. The better solution is not having to determine what is critical and selecting it all. Why go through the time of conducting business impact analysis just to find out at the time of disaster that you didn’t capture the one file or system for recovery because no one identified it as being critical.

The primary reason IT managers would go through this pain staking process of only selecting the data needed was due to infrastructure limitations which aren’t as much of an issue today. Usually there was limited disk space, tape devices, offsite storage costs or WAN bandwidth limits on the amount of data that could be transferred in a 24 hour period. These limitations aren’t nearly the hurdle that they use to be. Storage is much cheaper and more flexible that it has ever been, bandwidth is cheaper and with solutions like SilverPeak and Riverbed there is the ability to expand and optimize the existing bandwidth in place versus upgrading throughput. Because these limitations have been removed data center managers now have the ability to select a full server workloads or entire LUN’s full of virtual disk images.

Not only does this prevent the potential of missing or forgetting to back something up it provides an easier method of recovery. Now you don’t have to worry about is that file in the right directory or drive mapping, just recover the entire physical or virtual disk image and you are back in action. Another benefit is this also provides the ability to recover to different hardware platforms. In the past if the server you lost was from one vendor it usually required you to order a duplicate server from the same vendor before you could even begin the restoration process. Now you have the ability to restore entire workloads to any hardware platform or any virtual platform as well.

The same process applies to backing up virtual machines. Don’t get bogged down in selecting which active or inactive virtual machine should be backed up. Select the entire virtual host and forget about it. This way you are assured that you don’t miss that one vmdk or vhd file that is critical to recovering your infrastructure. What if that one virtual disk image was a primary domain controller, active directory or more likely the content server that the SharePoint or IIS database references? Backing up the entire virtual host allows you to set and forget and eliminates the potential of leaving something out of the backup process.

Save yourself some time and don’t think so granular. Select it all and don’t worry at the time of recovery if you are missing something.