If your Server stops, your Business shouldn't!

The only reason we perform backups is to be able to recover. To repair or replace a failed server takes, on average, 24-48 hours - this has a direct operational, and therefore financial, burden to a business. Once upon a time most businesses would be able to continue working with just some extra effort required to catch up on the data entry. Today most businesses would be significantly impacted by taking a single server out of operation for a day or more. Generally that down time can be counted in thousands of dollars per hour.

The Business Continuity Appliance is a robust, reliable and vendor independent Image Repository and Recovery Environment in which a failed server can rapidly be put back in production in a virtual environment while the failed hardware is repaired or replaced. A typical server of 100GB (system & data) can be brought back into production in less than 15 minutes, providing true value for money.

A Turnkey Solution for all your Business Continuity Needs

Business Continuity Planning is an essential process for today's non-stop businesses. Having a formal procedure for how you will recover and restore an IT resource in a predetermined time after a disaster or a severe malfunction allows a business to minimise the impact of these events. A little planning now can save you thousands later!

The Business Continuity Appliance (BCA) combines all the essential elements needed for a solid Business Continuity process by having a one-stop-shop dedicated turnkey appliance rather than spreading them over several pieces of IT infrastructure (NAS, failover servers, standby servers etc).

What the Business Continuity Appliance gives your business

• Quick, Hassle Free Centralised Business Continuity: The BCA has been designed to meet all your Business Continuity requirements. Save on having to buy multiple devices and systems to implement your Business Continuity Strategy and experience the peace of mind of knowing that if something will fail you can recover.


• A centralised Image Repository for your Images: The BCA acts as an image repository and as it is an NTFS volume there is no need to break up images into 4GB chunks (something that has to be done with Linux based NAS devices running Samba). IT professionals can also browse and check images using a familiar Windows Explorer interface rather than logging on via a web interface (common approach with NAS systems). A minimum of 1TB ensures plenty of room for multiple backup sets and iterations.


• A Recovery Environment for your Servers: The virtual recovery environment that is included with the BCA can restore both 64-bit and 32-bit Windows operating systems at a rate in excess of 100GB per hour. By having the virtual machine running on the same machine as the images any given server can be restored quickly and efficiently. No need to set up a virtual environment on one machine and then connect to the NAS box, copy the image(s) to it, etc. No need to worry about driver compatibility, the virtual environment on the BCA uses standard drivers which are fully supported in the recovery mode.


• The Ability to test your Backup Images: Taking backups is only the first step, how do you know that your backups are in fact not corrupt or will work if needed? With the BCA a server can be restored virtually and backup images tested to ensure that they are not corrupt.


• Staging Platform for Server Migrations or Upgrades: Taking a server offline for scheduled maintenance, upgrades or migrations can cause disruption and unnecessary hassle. With the BCA you can run the server and it's services virtually while the physical server is being worked on giving you unprecedented business continuity.


• Image Management: The BCA comes installed with StorageCraft's ImageManager and various other tools to simplify the management of base and incremental images. As it utilises a Windows Operating System any other successful scripts or management strategies you may have devised can also be used on the BCA.


• Off-site Image Management: Having an offsite copy of images is essential for Business Continuity. The BCA can manage any take-home devices (such as Tandberg RDX Cartridges or LaCie USB drives) meaning you don't need to have them attached to the servers or use server CPU resource for copying images to them. Customers who are looking at electronic offsite capabilities can use the pre-installed Blade File Transfer System client to implement a robust transfer mechanism (requires a Blade File Transfer System Server to transfer to).


• Automatic Defragmentation and System Optimisation: The BCA comes with Diskeeper Pro installed. Diskeeper is an automatic defragmentation and file access improvement tool that runs in the background to ensure the BCA performs at its peak at all times. A full overview of Diskeeper technologies can be found here.


• Windows Familiarity: As the BCA runs a Windows 7 Operating System anyone can start using it quickly without having to learn a new Management interface or procedures. The BCA can be added quickly to Active Directory, use existing network monitoring and performance tools or even restore a failed server remotely using RDP

Technical Details

Fundamental to the design of the Business Continuity Appliance was the need to ensure that both the software and hardware components complemented and worked with each other to deliver a robust and efficient solution.

At its core the BCA runs on a pre-installed Windows 7 64-bit operating system to which Diskeeper Pro has been added to ensure this appliance continues to perform at optimum speed. The Recovery Environment utilises Sun VirtualBox Hypervisor and an ISO image of the ShadowProtect Recovery CD to utilise StorageCraft restoration technologies.

Other preinstalled tools include the StorageCraft ImageManager; The Blade File Transfer System and a sync utility for copying images to off-site storage devices.

The StorageCraft ImageManager allows you to use the Continuous Incremental capability of ShadowProtect in an easy to use and manageable fashion. The Blade File Transfer System client has been included to facilitate transfer of backup images offsite electronically in a robust, reliable and secure manner (requires a Blade File Transfer Server at off-site location). The BCA also ships with a utility to automate the transfer of the latest backup sets to physical media such as RDX QuikStor cartridges or USB Hard Drives. Alternatively, if you still choose to use tape as your offsite media simply install your preferred tape backup software - no open files or agents to worry about and only a workstation version required.

Technical Specifications

Join the Business Continuity revolution with ShadowProtect and the Soft Solutions Business Continuity Appliance today!

Call 0-800-733 233 or e-mail sales@sofsol.co.nz to find out more