We at MG Technology Group are proud to announce the availability of our next-generation disaster recovery solution powered by Doyenz.
We've been active in the small and mid-sized business (SMB) space for many years. Disaster recovery was and still is a top concern for most businesses. There have been some significant improvements over the years – especially recently with the wide-spread availability of virtualization.
In general the key components of a disaster recovery plan include:
- Frequent backups
- On-site and off-site storage of backups
- Testing of the backups to ensure they are usable
- Duration of backups and restore must minimize disruption to the business
Many solutions are available that meet these requirements. The catch, however, is how well they meet them. For example, using tape as a backup media is slower than using a hard disk.
Our new disaster recovery solution works like this:
- Local backups are taken – these backups are hardware agnostic (meaning they can be restored to any machine that meets a basic set of requirements) – typically a full backup and then incremental every 15 minutes.
- The backups are done to a local USB drive.
- The backups are also synced to a data center located in the US (critical for some compliance issues)
- The backups in the data center can be accessed via a web console – including starting up the backup machine in a "sandbox" (an environment not connected to anything outside of itself)
- In the event of a failure the local backup can be "restored" in minutes using any available hardware that meets the minimum requirements (in many cases a workstation can be used).
- In the event of a catastrophic failure we can have the server(s) up and running in our data center in minutes.
The first few bullet points are nothing new; there are a lot of companies offering these solutions. The features that make our solution different are that you can easily test your off-site backup to ensure it is fully functional. By seeing your server boot and having the ability to check files, databases, etc. you have 100% confidence it will be usable when it is needed. And this test takes very little time.
There are some added benefits of this "sandbox" environment as well that I will discuss in a future post – just imagine easily testing a Service Pack or other major change BEFORE doing it on a production server.
The other differentiator is the ability to "Failover in the Cloud". This means that in minutes MG Technology Group can turn on the last backup (or any other point in time backup still available) and make it available for production in our data center. The transition process is easy, backups continue to happen and restoring back to a local server after the disaster is easy.
It is true that some application will perform much slower over a WAN and a few will not function at all in a disaster having access to most of your server functions versus none can make or break a business.
Around 50% businesses fail during a disaster – largely due to the inability to continue doing business. A major contributor to this is a lack of IT systems.
We also have "desktops" available via Terminal Services that can be brought on-line quickly should a business need applications that will not tolerate WAN speeds.
Imagine the possibilities – your customers (if you are an IT service provider) or your business can continue to function during a disaster.
We have a great partner program for this and other solutions. You can contact us at:
MG Technology Group – The Solution to Business Evolution™
www.MGTechGroup.com | 1-866-350-9310
Some of the information in this article was gathered from: