i365 Extends Cloud Server Disaster Recovery

A downed or unavailable server, like storage problems, can be the kind of show-stopper that no business wants to think about, much less suffer from. It's impossible to completely prevent this from happening, but options for recovering, and resuming business, continue to get simpler and less expensive. So much so that even small and midsize businesses can -- and should -- consider them. It's not just about continuing/resuming "business as usual," either; for organizations in medical, finance and other industries, ensuring availability is part of their regulatory compliance obligations.

To make server recovery easier, faster and less expensive, i365, Inc. announced additions to its EVault Remote Disaster Recovery (RDR) Service. i365, a Seagate company, provides professional-grade on-premise and cloud-connected storage solutions, and cloud-based storage and disaster recovery services, for SMBs. According to Karen Jaworski, Director of Product Management, i365, "EVault RDR is a managed hosted cloud-based service that helps organizations quickly recover critical applications after a disaster, enabling employees to remotely access those applications in a secure virtual environment. It's designed to protect customers from the impact of site disasters, and to recover their critical applications, within the cloud, in 24 to 48 hours." The traditional approach of off-site tape backups, and disaster recovery sites with fully duplicated hardware is typically too expensive and complex for most SMBs. Third-party disaster recover sites and virtualization have helped reduce these costs; similarly, the time and cost to do backups, and perform failover, has continued to decline. i365 EVault RDR integrates with the company's EVault Cloud-Connected storage offerings. EVault RDR does periodic backups of the selected servers; in the event of an incident, the backup can be restored and run in a secured virtual environment in an i365 data centers. i365 also offers professional services to help SMBs set up and test EVault RDR. "Backup and recovery has been a big pain point for companies of all types and sizes," says Dines, Rachel, Analyst, Infrastructure & Operations, Forrester Research. "Moving to cloud-based not just for backup but also to run recovery servers is making enterprise-class D/R available to companies of all sizes, and making it much faster, easier and less expensive." New features in i365 EVault Remote Data Recovery include: -- Support for additional operating systems besides Windows, including IBM AIX, Linux, IBM i (formerly known as OS/400, for use on IBM Power Systems), and VMware -- either entire ESX servers or individual VM -- reflecting the often-heterogeneous IT environments of mid-market companies. -- Availability of i365's Toronto data center. Because of the legal implications of trans-border data flow, "Canadians don't want their data moving into the United States, says Jaworski. According to Jaworski, companies can start up with EVault RDR without needing any on-site visits, everything can be done over the phone or online. Companies should be prepared to allow up to several weeks to create your plan, schedule all the start-up tasks, do the initial backup and configuration, and run tests. Server and data backups are done on a scheduled basis -- typically nightly, but they can be scheduled more frequently. When a recovery is necessary, the company has the option of choosing the most recent save or, an older recovery point, in case, for example, of data corruption or a virus. According to i365, "EVault Remote Disaster Recovery provides customers with a team of DR experts that guide the planning, testing and recovery processes, and offers comprehensive packages containing everything customers need to recover their mission critical systems including servers, storage, external IP addresses, VPN Connections and DR tests." Pricing for offsite disaster recovery protection depends on factors including type/number of servers, data and VPN connections, and length of contract, and starts at $250 per month for one server. FURTHER READING: -- Recovering Servers In The Cloud Affordable For SMBs. -- LaCie Rolls Out SMB Servers -- Data Retention Policies Absent Or Partially Implemented