Ask the expert

IT managers have been backing up their servers and, occasionally, their desktops, for years. Backup isn’t new. Why should IT managers today be any more concerned with backing up their systems than in the past? What’s changed and why should IT managers care?

Possibly more than any other market segment, technology changes — sometimes on a daily basis. The expectations and results that were deemed acceptable from your disaster recovery strategies just a few years ago are completely inadequate today.

In the past, it was quite acceptable to copy files off to tape, have a truck pick up the tapes, and then cart them off to some vault in a mountainside. Tape was the cheapest backup medium and backups were handy to have. If a backup needed to be restored, a request was made for the tape to be located in the vault, returned to the IT department, and then restored — assuming, of course, that you could find it and then you could restore it — that was not a certainty. Sometimes the data on the tape had become corrupted. If the tape was more than a year old or older and hadn’t been rewound on a scheduled basis, the physical tape itself might be damaged. And, of course, we’re assuming that you could find the right tape with the right data without returning every tape made that day or week ….. or month!

Today, however, data needs to be available immediately. Make no mistake; downtime is hazardous to your corporate health. According to the U.S. Archives and Records Administration, 93% of the companies that lost their data center for 10 days or more filed for bankruptcy within one year of the disaster and 50% of business that found themselves without data management for this same period of time filed for bankruptcy immediately. Gartner Inc., one of the largest market research and consulting firms, says that two of five companies that experience a disaster go out of business within five years. These numbers are alarming when you consider some of natural and man-made disasters of the past five years.

These statistics demonstrate that even if you have a backup of your servers and workstations, if you cannot restore them to working order, your backups are essentially useless and your company’s health and longevity are at risk.

Let’s take a look at what’s changed over the years in corporate computing.

From a hardware perspective, processors, storage and network technologies, as well as video, have turned the computer into in ever-changing platform. Even if you purchase multiple servers from the same vendor at the same time, there is no guarantee that the hardware in any two boxes will be identical. As a result, you can no longer be assured that if you need to restore a system from one Dell server to another, for example, you’ll be able to do so without major driver issues. And remember, Windows doesn’t like to be moved from system to system — it checks Security ID (SID) numbers, for example, to make sure that the software isn’t being pirated.

Today, government regulation, such as the Sarbanes-Oxley Act, HIPPA and other similar consumer-protection regulations, put more pressure on companies to be able to document their internal security and privacy policies. It’s not enough to say: “There’s a stack of backup tapes; the email in question is there.” Today, you have to produce these emails and documents for government inquiries. Tape-based access is incredibly slow; disk-based image backups are considerably faster to access and easier to search.

Access is everything. Restoration of backups is everything. Here are some answers to questions IT managers often ask about restoring backups.

How do you overcome the hardware and software traps to restore your server to dissimilar hardware?

Restoring a system to dissimilar hardware requires the IT manager to manage not only the restoration of the image, but also incorporating new hardware drivers. There are two ways to accomplish this. The Acronis approach is very familiar to Windows users — during the installation of the image (the drive can be bare metal — an unformatted drive new out of the box), the operating system will identify new hardware and ask the user to put in the CD or point to the disk location where the drivers can be found. The approach makes it possible for virtually anyone with rudimentary software installation experience to restore an image to dissimilar hardware.

Another approach is to strip out all information about the system — the network, SID and all of the user accounts on the system. Once the image is restore, the network manager would then have to reconfigure the system completely, adding in the SID, network ID, network configuration, and all user accounts. This approach, used by other backup software companies, is cumbersome, prone to error, and extremely labor-intensive. It defeats the purpose of getting a system up and running in minutes, not hours or days.

What role does disk imaging play in system virtualization?

One of the most significant new technologies today is virtualization. Be it used for server consolidation or storage management, virtualization has become the technology to watch for the latter half of this first decade of the 21st Century.

If your IT department is consolidating servers to reduce hardware and environmental expenses (air conditioning, general electrical use, real estate expenses), then you most likely will be moving from one hardware platform to another. Here, the ability to restore to dissimilar hardware quickly and easily is one of the most important tasks.

If you are simply deploying new servers, you don’t want to get bogged down in the time-consuming task of matching hardware — as noted earlier, the task is futile. You want to create a single, master image and then deploy it across your network to all new virtual machines, regardless of their hardware platform.
And, if possible, you want to manage your personnel costs as well. Rather than employing your most expensive, most highly skilled engineers to deploy new systems, you’d be better served by having technicians deploy systems and save your engineers for troubleshooting network issues.

However, maybe you already deployed virtual servers and now you’re adding new applications. Some applications simply will not operate on virtual machines. In those rare but significant occasions, you’ll need to be able to migrate from a virtual to a physical server. Today, only Acronis True Image Enterprise Server with Universal Restore makes that task easy.

Whether the requirement is virtual-to-virtual (V2V), physical-to-virtual (P2V) or virtual-to-physical (V2P) conversions, IT departments need to be aware that not all deployment tools are alike. While some might talk about tools that are optimized for enterprises or part of an enterprise suite, don’t be fooled. Be sure to test the tools in your own environment in as many different ways as possible. Only then will you be able to separate the “enterprise integration marketing hype” from the real enterprise tools.

How can I ensure that I have all my user data backed up?

It used to be that the IT manager was the keeper of the corporate data. Today, only 60 percent is under IT’s control; the rest resides on laptops, desktops, and devices such as the Blackberry and the Palm. While users are comfortable synchronizing their handhelds with their computers, they often forget that if their computer fails, all of their data will be lost.

IT has a couple of ways to help remind their users to back up their systems. The most common, of course, is the letter from IT reminding employees to back up. This is probably about as effective as sending out reminder notices to change passwords regularly or to clean the trash off their hard disks. In other words — it’s not very successful.

A far more efficient and effective way is to create schedules that reside on the users’ systems. When a system is connected to the corporate network, it will automatically back itself up at a specific time and based on predefined rules. This is a very efficient way to back up desktops that are rarely disconnected from the network, but how do you address laptops?

Again, the key is scheduling. For users who seldom connect to the corporate network, you can create a hidden partition on the laptop called the Acronis Secure Zone. Images of the laptop can be stored here, then copied to the server when the laptop connects. All this can be done through scripts written by the IT department. Acronis’ built-in scripting capabilities make it easy to schedule events, including those based on a given activity. For example, you can create a script that will run when a system is turned on or turned off. These event-driven scripts provide even greater flexibility.
Now let’s look at a couple of examples in different business sectors.

Fentura Financial

Fentura Financial, Inc. is a bank holding company headquartered in Fenton, MI. The company owns a controlling interest in The State Bank headquartered in Fenton, MI, and Davison State Bank headquartered in Davison, MI, and West Michigan Community Bank headquartered in Hudsonville, MI. All three Banks are full-service community banks offering a wide range of banking services to individuals, small business and government entities in the market they serve.
Before implementing Acronis True Image, Fentura Financial relied on a tape-based solution for backup and recovery. While this met the basic needs of backup and recovery, it was not working very well. As a financial institution, the bank was required to retain an ever-increasing amount of data, meaning thousands of tapes. Searching for the right tape to recover a specific file was often next to impossible and took countless hours. Furthermore, while the tape solution was adequate for data retention, it did not provide bare metal recovery to restore an entire system.

Acronis True Image was introduced to the IT Department from direct customer usage; the network services officer in charge of looking for replacement solutions had used Acronis True Image at home. The solution worked so well that he was willing to purchase it for the bank.

Fentura Financial implemented Acronis True Image quickly and easily; no user training was required for the implementation. The bank is currently using Acronis True Image Corporate Workstation and Acronis True Image Enterprise Server. The server product is running on 40 servers, representing 100% of file servers at the bank. Backups are created daily to disk-based storage. Fentura Financial is completely satisfied with the solution; specific files or an entire system can be restored in minutes.

“We are completely satisfied with Acronis True Image Enterprise Server and Acronis True Image Corporate Workstation,” said Brian Minca, network services officer. “We can recover specific files or an entire system in minutes.”

Land O’Frost

Founded by Antoon Van Eekeren in the 1950s, Land O'Frost manufactures lunch and deli meats (beef, chicken, turkey, and ham) under the Dagwood's, Land O'Frost, Taste Escapes, Premium, and private-label brands. Land O'Frost also provides meat ingredients to food manufacturers and restaurants. The company is now managed by Eekeren's descendants and continues to expand; it is building a third manufacturing plant in Madisonville, KY, to supplement its two existing manufacturing plants in Illinois and Arkansas and meet the growing demand for convenience foods.

Land O'Frost faced three main challenges:

1. The company needed a reliable, fast backup-and-restore solution that would not force a system shutdown and fit in within its day-to-day usage of computers.
2. A solution that allowed the company to restore an entire computer, be it a server or a workstation, in a short amount of time.
3. A solution that was more reliable than their current backup solution.

Land O'Frost evaluated three solutions by testing the product on workstations and servers in the network. Each software package was installed and evaluated several different areas: first, was the amount of time it took to backup the same amount of data for each package; second, the complexity of actually performing the backups both manually and using automation; and third, the manageability of remote backups and how complex they would be to restore.

The company also looked at the reliability and integrity of the data that was being backed up. Land O'Frost selected Acronis because it provided more flexibility with managing the disk images, was a faster backup than the others, and restored systems more quickly than the other two solutions.

Land O'Frost has successfully implemented a number of Acronis products. The company is running Acronis True Image Workstation and Acronis True Image Universal Restore on some 200 workstation in three locations. The workstations all are running Microsoft Windows XP. In addition to Microsoft Office, the workstations are running a variety of applications such as Laser Fiche; Logility Solutions, a manufacturing product; IBM Terminal Emulation Software; Hyperion Essbase; Ultimate Software Payroll; Kronos Time and Attendance; and various other database applications.

More than half of the company's workstations were up and running with Acronis in just a few weeks. The implementation required no training and any issues that came up were quickly addressed by Acronis customer support. Land O'Frost particularly appreciated the remote installation module of Acronis as it allowed the company to install and manage systems without dispatching a technician to each and every system.

Land O'Frost has also implemented Acronis True Image Enterprise Server and Acronis True Image Universal Restore on two of network servers and plans to expand the implementation to all 12 servers in the network. The servers are used for a variety of purposes, most of which are application and database servers. The servers run Microsoft SQL Server.

"Our implementation of Acronis True Image has been a complete success," said Phillip Woodson, Information Services Analyst at Land O'Frost. “It has accomplished the end result we wanted and given us the ability to recover a lost hard drive in a matter of hours as opposed to a being down a day or possibly two.”

Woodson understands — it’s not only time that’s lost when a server fails; it’s work, productivity, and profits.

We’ve looked at some of the key components to ensuring your backup images are there to save your business when disaster strikes. There is one final point to make: Whatever backup strategy you select, test it often and then test it again. You never know when unplanned downtime will strike; make sure you’re prepared.

Walter Scott, CEO brings over fifteen years of software experience to Acronis. Prior to Acronis Walter was President and CEO of Imceda Software, a database backup software company which was sold to Quest Software in May of 2005. Walter was Vice President of Sales and an Executive Officer of Embarcadero Technologies. During his four year tenure at Embarcadero the company achieved the status of the number one IPO of 2000 and grew sales from $18 million to $56 million. After his honorable discharge from the U.S. Army, Walter held sales, sales management and marketing rolls at BMC Software and Banyan Systems. Walter holds a MBA from the University of Maine.

About Acronis

When it comes to disaster recovery, it’s the recovery that’s critical. Acronis True Image provides a comprehensive protection and recovery solution that gets your servers and workstations back to business in minutes, not hours or days, minimizing downtime and keeping your employees productive. With versions for enterprise servers, networked workstations, and stand-alone Windows and Linux servers, Acronis restores backup images to dissimilar hardware, supports virtual and physical machines, future-proofs your infrastructure with support for 64-bit software, and never miss a deadline with Snap Restore, a patent-pendingtechnology that lets your staff keep working even while the image is being restored. www.acronis.com/NoTime