Organizations are in a need to keep their businesses always up and running. But, the fact is, all businesses are susceptible to disasters (Natural/Man-made). This could lead to data loss causing interruption for business operations. That’s why backup and recovery is still the best strategy to protect the business-critical data.
But, recovery is still an overlooked factor when zeroing in on backup software.
It should not be!
In fact, the recovery of the data is the primary reason why you started looking for a backup solution in the first place.
However, when thinking about recovery, what I consider to be the most important factors are:
- Reliable Backups
- Recovery Point Objective (RPO) & Recovery Time Objective (RTO)
- Multiple Recovery options – To handle different scenarios
In this blog, I’ll give an insight into the aforementioned factors and how Vembu BDR Suite handles it.
Reliable Backups
The first thing is the reliability of backups. Creating backups are easy, but ensuring the reliability of backups is all you need.
The backup data might be accessed very frequently or very rarely. That being said, whenever you access your data to perform recovery or any other operations, you should be able to get your data back.
Only if the backup data accuracy and consistency is properly maintained, you can restore it appropriately. If something goes wrong, then your business may face serious implications. Hence, it is necessary to check whether your data is being backed up correctly.
The best way to test the reliability of your backups is to verify the recoverability of your backups. Backup verification provides assurance that the backed up data is in the way that it should be.
Vembu takes the backup reliability seriously and offers Automatic Backup Verification to save you from critical situations like ending up with data inconsistency.
Vembu performs different tests on your backup data to verify its recoverability. The various tests include:
Boot Test – The image-level backup data is automatically booted as a VM and its recoverability is checked. Every 24hrs, the boot test is automatically performed with the latest recovery point and the screenshot of the boot screen is mailed to the users.
Mount Test – The backup disk is automatically mounted to your backup server machine. The mount operation verifies the disk mount ability to explore the data inside it.
Data Integrity Test – This test validates the consistency and correctness of the data that you backup. This provides the ability to recover the data to its original state with 100% accuracy.
Recovery Point Objective (RPO) & Recovery Time Objective (RTO)
In simple terms, RPO is the amount of data loss your business can afford and RTO is the downtime that you experience when a disruption occurs. The RPO & RTO can create a major impact on your business.
Keeping this in mind, these two metrics must be properly defined.
Setting short RPO is that you are affording to lose only minimal data. For example, Near RPO like 15mins can be set for business critical systems and longer RPO like an hour or a few hours can be set for other systems. At the time of restoration, you will be able to choose the most recent recovery point of backups.
The RTO is wholly dependent on the backup solution that you choose. Hence it is advised to select a solution that offers lesser RTO to quickly return to a fully operational business status. The lesser the RTO is, the faster you can recover your backups.
Vembu BDR Suite offers the industry best RPO & RTO of less than 15mins.
- For Image-level backups, Vembu offers near-continuous data protection. You can perform backups as frequently as every 15 minutes
- For File-level backups, Vembu offers continuous data protection. This ensures that you don’t lose even minutes worth of data
- To assure an RTO of < 15mins, Vembu offers multiple instant recovery options like Quick VM recovery, Disk Management Mount, File-level Recovery. With these options, Vembu lets you restore the instantly entire machine or required file/folder within few mins. These recovery options are discussed in detail in the next section
Multiple Recovery Options – To handle different scenarios
There are different causes for data loss.
And, each cause can have different levels of impact.
So we require different recovery strategies to quickly restore the business operations to the normal state.
The backup solution that offers multiple recovery options allows you to leverage on the recovery option that is a perfect fit depending on the severity of the disaster.
Vembu BDR Suite offers multiple recovery options to choose the one based on the business needs, type of disaster, and underlying infrastructure.
Quickly launch a VM to start functioning – If there occurs a major disaster or any system crash, businesses cannot afford a long downtime for their business-critical servers. To handle such cases, Vembu offers Quick VM Recovery option and ensures an RTO < 15mins. You will be able to instantly restore the backed up virtual/physical machines as a VM on VMware ESXi/Hyper-V/KVM host by directly reading the backup data from storage targets which is still compressed and encrypted. To restore selective files/folders – In case of accidental deletion or corruption of particular files/folders, then restoring the entire machine isn’t the right strategy. For this scenario, you can choose Vembu File-Level Recovery that lets you instantly restore only the selective files/folders from backups.
Mounting Backups – Vembu offers Disk Management Mount option to instantly mount the backed up disks (VM/physical machine) directly on the disk management of BDR server. The disks are virtually mounted without consuming any space in your backup server and hardly takes seconds to get completed. Once the backup disk gets attached, you get access to all the files/folders locally.
All the aforesaid recovery options are specifically designed for instant recovery purposes with which organizations can get their business up and running in a few mins, thereby ensuring business continuity.
Vembu also offers several other recovery options like Bare Metal Recovery, Live VM Recovery to perform the permanent full restore of the backed up VMs & physical machines.
Further, through the recovery option – Download, Vembu provides the flexibility to migrate your backed up machines from one platform to another (V2V, P2V & V2P).
Takeaways
Data loss can happen in different ways. In the end, all that matters is, whether you are ready to overcome it?
Having backups alone cannot save you.
Backups are worth only if they are recoverable. So, it is important to verify the recoverability of backups to rely on them.
Then, the restore speed is important. Only if the recovery gets complete quickly, the production operations can be instantly resumed within a few mins.
Finally, the restored machines in the production must process as before.
Hope this blog helps you in understanding the importance of recovery and the factors that are to be considered when thinking about recovery.
Interested in trying Vembu BDR suite?
Try our 30-days free trial now: https://www.bdrsuite.com/vembu-bdr-suite-download/
Got questions? Email us at vembu-support@vembu.com for answers.
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