Simple, Unified Disaster Recovery for Physical and Virtual Servers

Jason Reid Blogs

Unified Disaster Recovery Blog

If you run an entirely physical estate, or you have legacy physical servers remaining within your environment, unified disaster recovery ensures that your entire environment is protected.

We all know by now the benefits that virtualisation brings. Virtualisation platforms offer excellent resource utilisation, ease of management, faster provisioning, and of course rapid disaster recovery. In fact, for many the ability to deliver easy, streamlined disaster recovery is a key benefit of virtualisation technology.

But what about physical servers? Despite the utopian virtualised world that cloud providers now project, many organisations still run physical servers. This often means one solution for protecting the virtual environment and another for the physical. But how do you deliver disaster recovery for physical servers that comes close to matching virtual server data protection?

Physical Servers are Still Out There

Although virtual servers have been around for some time now, physical servers still endure. At AssureStor we tend to see two main scenarios where physical servers are utilised by organisations: –

  • Small Businesses with Small Server Farms. Not all businesses require large virtualised server farms delivering advanced functionality and multiple applications. There are still many businesses who will operate a small three server estate with email, file and print functionality and not much else. The benefits of virtualisation do not really come to bear in such small deployments.
  • Larger Organisations with Legacy Physical Servers. Ask many IT managers of large organisations and the chances are they’ll have at least one or two legacy physical servers running alongside their virtual server farm. These physical servers are often running business-critical applications that, for whatever reason – whether it’s compatibility or pain of transition – cannot be moved to a virtual platform.

Physical servers are still out there. And what’s more, they are often running business-critical applications or storing important, confidential data. So how do you protect them?

Unified Disaster Recovery for Physical and Virtual Servers

Take a look at traditional disaster recovery for physical servers, and you start to realise why virtualisation has become so popular. Cumbersome, slow tape-based recovery is the norm for physical servers, and in today’s working environment that is simply not good enough.

Tape-based disaster recovery is painful to manage. It is a potential security risk, and – assuming the backup tapes work, which is hardly a given – recovery times often stretch into days.

This isn’t acceptable, and AssureStor have recognised this. To date, our dr2cloud platform has focussed on delivering hypervisor replication for virtual servers. However, we have seen the need for a unified disaster recovery service capable of protecting virtual and physical servers without compromising recovery times for the physical environment.

On Monday 3rd October we launched dr2cloud SMB, an extension of the dr2cloud service that delivers streamlined protection for your entire business. Based on technology from Infrascale, dr2cloud SMB provides micro and macro disaster protection for both physical and virtual servers, offering impressive guaranteed recovery times of 15 minutes.

dr2cloud SMB protects your entire server estate more effectively than multiple solutions. To find out more about dr2cloud SMB and how AssureStor provides unified disaster recovery for any environment, please contact us.