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media@acronis.com Original article on Let's Talk Computers website
Listen to Acronis, Inc.'s July 15th, 2006 interview using:
Acronis True Image 9.1 Enterprise Server pt. 2
Complete Transcript of Stephen Lawton — Acronis Interview on Let's Talk Computers July 15th 2006Why your Company's "Recovery Strategy" must include the capability
of restoring to the same machine or to a completely different machine. Alan: Most companies have a backup strategy, but do they really have the right recovery strategy? Our guest today, is Stephen Lawton, Director of Marketing with Acronis. And welcome back to LTC, Stephen. Stephen: Thanks for having me back. Alan: Your Company does backups every single day. And you may think you have good backups. But, it's only when you restore them, do you really know how good they were. That's what really separates the... Stephen: The "employed" from the "unemployed". Alan: Exactly. If you can't restore it, then your company is not going to be around. There are statistics that have stated that if a company cannot restore its data, they don't stay in business very long after that, do they? Stephen: Gartner and the U.S. Department of Labor Statistics have done studies on that. They basically concluded that a company that's "out of business" for more than five days, anywhere from 60% to 75% of those companies will be out of business within five years. So, all it takes is five days of not having your systems up and running. And quite frankly, I think we saw a lot of companies, (small companies) in the Southeast that were victims of (not only Katrina), but also before that Hurricane Charley and going back years and years — anybody that lives in an area that's subject to floods, hurricanes, earthquakes — they need to know that they can get their systems back up and running in minutes, anywhere. Whether that server's going to be local or remote. They need that assurance. Alan: It used to be, when you backed something up, you backed it up to files or you backed it up to tape and the first you have to do in order to restore something, is to regain the operating system. Now, it it's a Windows Server or if it's an Exchange Server that can take you forever. I mean you're talking about days' worth of trying to get the server back into a stable state with the right updates and the right service packs and just exactly the way you have it. Those days are gone, aren't they? Stephen: The days of rebuilding every machine from scratch — you could do it, if you want to, there's no reason to. Now, you can take an image; restore that image, either to the same hardware or (and this is very important), different hardware. And it doesn't matter. It'll restore right back to a known good state. And here's the kicker, now. A lot of companies are considering the installation of virtual servers as a way of reducing the number of physical boxes that they have in their building. You've got to cut costs, everywhere. How do you cut costs on the IT side? Well, you reduce the number of physical servers and increase your number of virtual servers. Virtual servers may have a different hardware configuration (the box that you're moving your data from), and with Acronis True Image Universal Restore, we actually have the ability, now, to take that image of a physical box, say you might have it on a Dell Server, and restore that image to an IBM Server, running VMWare, or Microsoft Virtual Server 2005. And whatever the physical devices are in that server, we can allow the user to add those drivers during the restore process and the system will be back up and running again, as if you were putting it right on the same piece of hardware. Alan: Katrina has taught us that, because it our existing computers get waterlogged, and let's say they're a year old, you cannot find identical equipment. There's just no way that you can. You want to get up and running as fast as possible. And I guarantee you; it's not going to be the same equipment, not even close. Stephen: You don't even necessarily know what the same equipment is. You might buy servers from Dell, you put one in a closet as a hot backup — it might have different hardware. And unless you're going through the machine and checking each card and each chip to make sure that the motherboards have the same network chip on there. It could be a nightmare, (an absolute nightmare). Alan: As anybody who's ever tried to work with dis-similar hardware knows that Windows, and especially a Windows Server is not forgiving. You see that Blue Screen of Death, because it either tried to load a driver that it couldn't find or it loaded a driver that it need and the first thing it does is basically, "upchuck" and leave you high and dry. Stephen: Let's say you're buying multiple servers from Dell. Dell's a great example. Some of the different hardware into the various boxes that they've got, based on what they have at hand. You might be getting a Maxtor drive this time and Seagate, the next time. You might get one vendor's Raid card, today and another one, tomorrow. Even worse, let's say you turn a PO for 20 servers. You might get 20 different cards, all in the same order. They all arrive at your office; all the boxes look the same. But the internals are different. Now, how do you move an image from one to the other? Without some type of Universal Restore capabilities, you'll be at it all night. Alan: You also have the ability to do remote restore, because a lot of times the Admin person is not in the physical building, because he's managing multiple sites for one large corporation. Stephen: We don't really care if the server is 10 feet away, 10 miles away, 10 states away. We have the capability to have a server either boot from boot media, if you're there, you can certainly use a boot disk. Or you can boot directly from the image, or even better, you can boot over the network. An IT Manager in Philadelphia can boot a system in Louisiana just as easily as they could boot a system in Lithuania. It doesn't matter where you are, anymore. Alan: Any time that we're doing backups, especially for a very large company or a corporation, we really need to have notifications, because, as I said, we may be completely offsite, and we may be managing multiple buildings in different cities and we want to know what got backed up and it something does go "bump in the night", we don't want to have to go read a report what didn't get done. We want to get an e-mail that says, "hey, this machine is having problems". Stephen: Well, only can we provide you with an e-mail. We can also provide you with a pop-up on your screen, we can send out message, MSN Messenger. I believe we're adding a page, so we can call your pager or your cell phone and reach you. I'm not sure if that capability has been added. I've talked to our engineers frequently and that is on the list of capabilities to be added. Alan: That's going to be one of those that we have to go to your website and just take a look and say, "yep, it just got added, next week" and we can get it. Stephen: Absolutely. A good reason to come back and check the new build to see what's been added. We're adding new capabilities all the time. Alan: Well, this is where your backup software really, really saves our butts. Because, as I say, Windows will go out there, do an automatic update on your server, the server reboots, you come in and you'll see a Blue Screen of Death. Now you have to figure out how fast you can get back up an running, because if it's a server, you have multiple, multiple people depending on that server. Time is money. And with yours, you just plug in a CD that is bootable and you're back up in minutes, not hours. Stephen: And you're absolutely right. It's not the machine, itself that's the direct cost. It's all of the people that depend on what's on that machine and the people who depend on those people to get access to the machine — it that's a database, if it's an e-mail server, that down the line cost can be enormous in a corporation. Alan: Well, I've seen so many companies that we've worked with in the past that you go in and something is wrong and the first thing we ask is, "well, where is your restore tape or where's your backup?" and they find out that on that restore disk that it does not have everything that it needs or there's a part of it that's corrupted. You have the ability to verify every backup after the fact to let us have that "warm, fuzzy feeling". Stephen: We absolutely have the ability to check a backup as soon as it's made. We also have the ability to check a backup before it's restored. Let's say you have a situation where one application has been damaged. And you want to restore that application. It's just easier to restore the entire image from last night. You want to check the image first, because if for some reason the initial verification — it might have been fine, but the disk might have been damaged between the time that the image was made and now. You don't want to restore an image that's going to be worse than the situation you're in, now. Alan: That's the worst thing that you could possibly, ever do is to take a situation where is maybe not working exactly right, and you go back and you try to restore it and then you find out that now not only is something's not exactly right, nothing even boots. Stephen: We believe in the Hippocratic oath, to "do no harm". So, we do everything we can to make sure you're always assured that you images are in good shape. So, that means checking it for before and after. Alan: Now, when you're talking about restoring an image — do we have the ability to actually make our own boot up disk? You know, sometimes depending on what kind of hardware we have on this particular machine, it may be proprietary and it may be unique and you may not be able to boot into it directly. Stephen: We have the ability and it comes with every copy of the software, to create a custom boot disk. We also support Bart PE, if you want to create a boot disk that has to up into Bart PE. You would do that if you have special drivers for example, that you might want to add. We give you that capability, as well. We use a Lenox kernel on our boot disk. And we do that for a very special reason. It looks exactly like Windows XP when you boot the Acronis Book Disk, because it's Lenox, it's very, very small. You can get a lot of information onto that boot disk. It gives you the ability to create a boot disk that has custom drivers, if you need them. And because it's Lenox, it will got out and be able to find virtually every network device out there — or FTP device out there. Alan: We've been talking a lot about images, you know. Backing up images, restoring images, but you also have the ability to if I just want to get a small set of files off those images, I don't have to restore the whole image. I could just actually go in there and find what files I need and pull them out. Stephen: You could actually take an image, and mount that image as a virtual disk and what I mean is, let's say you have letters "a" through "m" on your computer, already. The image would come up as drive "n". You could then go and pluck either a single file, an entire directory. If one of the employees accidentally deleted their "My Directories" folder, (with all of their sub-directories). You could bring all that back Just drag and drop, just like Windows XP. Alan: Someone messes up and they delete a spreadsheet or a delete a database, you don't need to restore everything that was on that image, you just want to get them up and running as fast as possible. And in this case, it may just be getting the last copy of the database, so that they can get going. Stephen: They might even have a file on their machine right now. They made a mistake, (they put something, they've changed something). And "by gosh", what they really need is that same file, but not today's file, but the one they did two days' ago. We can mount an "incremental image" for any day. We can do it at any point and time where you have an incremental image. Mount that image and take a file from that point and time. That makes it so much easier for the IT Manger to restore just what needs to be restored. Alan: Well, Steve, what are we looking as far as the cost of the Enterprise version? Stephen: The Suggested List Price for the standalone, Acronis True Image Server for either Lenox or Windows, is $699. For the Enterprise Server, it's $999. The only option that we offer is the Universal Restore Option and I strongly recommend that that's something that everybody needs for the Server products, that's an additional $299. For an Enterprise Server with all the bells and whistles, you're looking at roughly $1,200. Alan: Backup Software does not cost you money. It costs you money when you cannot get it backed up and when you cannot restore. Stephen: It costs a fortune when you cannot restore an image. Backup has been around for ages. We've always been backing up our software whether it's to floppies or to hard disks remotely or to tape. Back up is not new. What's new today is being able to restore that image, whether it's to the same machine, to a different machine, or to a virtual machine and being able to do that immediately. That's what new, today - To be able to take all the worries out of the equation and to know that you can get your server up and running, NOW. Alan: Well, Steve, always, it's been or pleasure to have out as our guest today, talking about strategies of backups in corporations and how critical it is to make sure that you can restore these backups and hope to have you on the air again, real soon, talking about some of your other fine products. Stephen: Thanks so much. It's always a pleasure to be here with you.
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