How to Speed Up Server Recovery Using a Virtual Environment

When a disaster strikes and the production servers go down, the most important device in your server room is actually the clock on the wall.

Every hour of downtime costs your organization money. For enterprises, the downtime can cost more than $1 million per hour, and even for small businesses it could push well beyond $20,000 an hour. Quite literally, in a disaster recovery situation, time is money and every second counts.

Even if you have complete disk-image backups of your entire server, you need to restore the system by moving the data from backup storage to your production hardware. Your server recovery time is proportional to the size of the backup – and it can be hours.

However, with unique technology from Acronis, you can skip the wait and significantly reduce recovery times – from hours to seconds, using Acronis Instant Restore™.

Instead of spending time moving data, Acronis Instant Restore lets you start the system on your existing Microsoft Hyper-V or VMware vSphere ESXi host — directly from the backup storage — without moving the data. Because you are not moving data, the server recovery time is down to a jaw-dropping 10-15 seconds.

Here’s how it works: The Acronis Backup 12 agent, which is installed on your virtual host, creates a virtual storage device on your host that looks like a datastore. Whenever the hypervisor reads from this virtual device, the agent will retrieve the data from the backup storage and present it to the hypervisor. As a result, there is no need to move the entire backup to the hypervisor storage – the reading of the backup happens on-demand. If the hypervisor wants to write data, it is written to temporary storage on the host.

As you can see, the technology is transparent to the hypervisor – the virtual machine (VM) will start, the operating system and applications will run, and the data will be available.

In order to ensure success, the Acronis Backup agent will also apply the versatile Acronis Universal Restore technology to the restored system. This instantly launches the backup of any system – physical or virtual, Windows or Linux.

Once your system is up and running, you can move the VM to another, more permanent datastore using either Acronis Backup 12, or your existing hypervisor’s capability, such as VMware vMotion.

The Result: You get your system recovered and you can start serving users again in seconds. Take that, clock on the wall!

To summarize, Acronis Instant Restore is the only technology on the market that helps you reduce server RTO to seconds by running any physical or virtual Windows or Linux system backup as a VMware or Hyper-V VM.

Do you want to try it for yourself? Check out the beta version of the forthcoming Acronis Backup 12 now and see how you can beat the clock when disaster strikes.