When Multiple Clients Face Disaster Recovery

[callmrchips_]

I have to support multiple clients regarding their networks and servers. Following the series of Hurricanes here in Florida, we had multiple clients experience "Bare Metal Recovery" (BMR) We are a small computer service company with a retail service center and 3 qualified network technicians for onsite service and support for small to midsize companies. Having experienced multiple client failures following a natural disaster we are evaluating our performance as well as the tools we used.

Most of our clients are smaller companies with modest IT budgets. Typically they do not have inside IT personnel. The main problem we encountered was the extraordinary amount of time required to reload and update an OS, (Server 2000, 2003 and Exchange at various locations!) Symantec Client Security,and its updates, Applications and their updates, Internet access, and finally data. Each of these recoveries took from 12 to 20 tech hours to bring these servers back on line and usable by the desktop workstations.

We are planning to require ALL our clients to use Backup Exec 10 and to maintain it in a fully upgraded version. Yet, we are still concerned with the amount of time required to bring a server back to full functionality. Most of our clients can not afford to implement the Veritas Bare Metal Recovery solution.

I would like to hear from other professionals that face the problem of supporting many, small-mid level clients all in a "server down" situation.

callmrchips!

[r_m_2]

How about Symantec's LiveState or Acronis.com True Image which are Ghost-like programs for servers. Make a image of the servers and workstations, keep a copy for yourself and another for the client. If disaster strikes again, restore the image and and then a recent backup - voila!

These programs are not inexpensive, but they do save time when the "chips" are down ;)

[Aalok_Pathak_2]

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[Varsha]

The query has been answered.

[gaurav_seth]

Greetings !!

From you rmail it appears that time is a main factor to bring the server up. With Backup Exec v10.0 you can have two types of disaster recovery options:
1. Manual Disaster recovery
2. IDR

You may have a look at these two options also as per your needs. Refer the manual:

VERITAS Backup Exec (tm) 10.0 for Windows Servers Administrator's Guide (English)
http://library.veritas.com/docs/269777l


Hope this will fulfill your requirements.

[Milin_Desai]

You should use the IDR option with BackupExec and that should help your situation. IDR will restore your machine to the last good backup.

[Ameet_Thakkar]

Implement a server recovery solution for both local and remote Windows servers, eliminating the need to first reload the entire operating system of crashed servers. Using either diskette-based, CD-R/CD-RW or bootable tape, Intelligent Disaster Recovery will quickly recover downed servers enabling restores from the last complete backup set including full, differential, incremental, and working set backups. The Intelligent Disaster Recovery Option integrates directly with Microsoft’s Automated System Recovery (ASR) functionality in Windows Server 2003 and Windows XP to provide complete disaster recovery on Windows servers.
So inorder to protect any computer be it local or remote, one needs to purchase license to enable the option.
Once you obtain the license from our Sales department, you may refer following technote to make the option work.
Kindly refer the following technote:-

1) The Intelligent Disaster Recovery (IDR) process, step by step http://seer.support.veritas.com/docs/192923.htm

Using IDR one can take backup of the server and recover it under disaster recovery situations and you can bring them back up to its pre-disaster state automatically.

Backup Exec software would help you backup all the files including services which are as System State and Databases which are backed up using agents.Backup Exec IDR gives complete recovery solution.
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We hope this helps. Let us know if you have any more questions or queries.