We all know that there are a few key considerations to an effective disaster recovery (DR) strategy. We make sure that; the backup completes successfully, verify that it is recoverable, send a copy offsite and have a plan for what to do when disaster strikes to get systems running again. Having a plan in place is of course vital. Downtime can be incredibly stressful for technicians and stakeholders of a business. Compromised systems mean compromised revenue. DR strategies typically have a lot of moving parts. All it takes is a simple chink in the chain to cause calamity during recovery time. Having all these moving parts governed under a single measure simplifies these moving parts. The answer is a SLA driven DR strategy, namely with StorageCraft’s ShadowXafe solution.
StorageCraft’s next generation ShadowXafe solution consolidates a lot of the moving parts of a DR strategy. It’s powerful, policy based administration makes life much easier for IT staff. It features the ability to set up backup schedules, reporting, retention policies and offsite the recovery points from a single console. It finds and deploys backup agents to endpoints, and reveals just what on the network is protected in the case of a disaster. ShadowXafe’s use of Google’s RPC framework allows for backups to be restored in milliseconds. It also automatically backfills as the machine is running, for a startlingly quick total recovery time. This offers significant speed advantages to total recovery time – compared to other solutions which may spin up a machine quickly, but still require a lengthy maintenance window afterwards to restore the entirety of the machine. The added advantage with ShadowXafe is that it is hardware agnostic and can restore to dissimilar hardware, when systems need to come back online as soon as possible.
ShadowXafe has a tight integration with StorageCraft’s Cloud services platform. This enables a whole organisation to virtualise in the Cloud for incredible business continuity. Cloud services even enable IT staff to pre-stage the virtualised network ahead of time – for when the system is virtualised. This grants the ability to connect a VPN to remote workers, directly from the Cloud. Combining ShadowXafe with StorageCraft Cloud gives organisations a solid, SLA driven, DR strategy where you can recover both on site or in the Cloud to keep a business running.