Disaster Recovery

Boss Global Technology Solutions Technical and Services Manager, Darren Coetzee, shares a few points around the offering that Boss offers it clients in terms of Disaster Recovery.

Firstly, its designed to be a DR solution for any business, who wishes to safeguard Data, servers, or applications from total loss/corruption(ransomware) theft… or… Disaster.

Traditionally, a company would have a local backup, which was written to tape, and stored offsite as a place like Metrofile for safeguarding.

This saved a few companies in the past, but it was Tedious.

If a server died (for whatever reason) the tape would be requested from Metrofile, catalogued onto the backup server, and then restored – process took 2,3,5 days sometimes longer, and this was assuming your backup server didn’t die also, if it did, one couldn’t catalogue a tape, and the backed up data was useless.

Then came Backup to disc, and offsite storage – Exact principal, except discs were a bit quicker to restore from (1 or 2 days at most)

We have taken this concept a step further, with emerging technologies like Veeam Replication, and Wan acceleration, we have built our own cloud based “Metrofile” of sorts, but a whole lot better!

How ours works is like this:

• You have a server at your offices, that hosts 3 or 4 virtual servers (Email, active directory, application, file)
• Users onsite access the servers daily, and the servers run all the time.
• We build an identical server, in our datacentre, in the cloud, and create a dedicated WAN link between our cloud server, and your onsite servers.
• Then we take an initial snapshot of your site – this builds all your virtual servers, into our hosted Server (the one that’s identical to your office one)
• At this stage, your office server, has all its virtual servers, with users using them, running live, and our cloud server, has all your virtual servers on it, waiting to be told to power on (which we don’t do unless we have to)
• On a minute for minute basis, your office server, updates any data and server changes to our cloud server, always, and continuously keeping the Cloud server(s) up to date (so that If we do have to power them on, you don’t loose a minutes work or data.

The beauty of this is:

If we need to restore a server onsite, it won’t take days, or weeks.. it’s a 2 minute fail over to the DR site, and users will then be working on the cloud server, without any realisation that anything has changed, also, failing back to site (to rebuild the onsite one) is done live, and without any downtime what so ever. If you happened to lose all servers onsite, no problem, we can seamlessly run your entire Server environment from the cloud, until we can rebuild on site – Indefinitely or permanently.

Once your servers are in the cloud, (you may actually want to keep them there – because of the level of redundancy , 99.997% guaranteed uptime, further Backup and DR to our own DR datacentre, and accessibility from anywhere in the world – Securely)

We take full responsibility for their functionality, and reverse networking back to site.

Lastly, once running in the cloud (in DR, or whichever) we load balance all your servers, over our Multi server Blade clusters, and high availability storage – flash storage, and Superpowered Blade systems – everything just becomes a whole lot faster.

Hope I’ve been able to shed a bit of insight around Disaster Recovery and how we can help businesses safe guard there data.

Darren Coetzee - Boss Global Technology Solutions