User's Manual

WHITE PAPER
6
Oxford’s network administrator virtualized a significant number of servers on a powerful Dell
®
2950 Linux
®
server, among them the district’s food service, Blackberry
®
and library servers, and he was impressed with
the speed of the migration effort. In the case of the food service application server, the conversion, including
transferring 85 GB worth of data, was done in 30 minutes. Moreover, by using the virtual edition version instead
of buying two Acronis Backup & Recovery 10 Advanced Server licenses, the district halved, approximately, the
purchase cost of protecting the virtual machines. As more virtual machines are added to the same host, the cost
of protecting each virtual server will continue to fall.
Acronis also simplifies deployments. Take, for example, the time the school district replaced its student
administration package. “After building the server, we loaded the Acronis Backup & Recovery 10 plug-in and
started running backups. It was so easy to configure Acronis and we had a backup completed in just 15 minutes,”
the network administrator says. Through the constant evolution of its IT environment, Acronis software remains
a constant. “Acronis is the most stable piece of software we have running now” he adds.
The Key to Dependable Disaster Recovery
Of course, virtualization is one of the most significant steps you can take to reduce IT costs, but virtualization
itself can also enable swift disaster recoveries when used with the latest recovery software. Two of the most
intriguing examples of how this can be done are active restore and instant restore.
Active restore is used for business-critical servers where functionality must be restored in under an hour, and
frequently in under 15 minutes. Active restore recovers the functionality of a failed server in seconds on another
virtual server. It recovers the operating system first and then restores files and folders in background. If user
accesses a particular file, it queues that one first. This approach can save up to 95% compared to the traditional
approach of rebuilding a machine and then restoring all the data before you can boot up the server.
Even more intriguing is instant restore, which takes only a few minutes to set up. Use this when seconds count for
recovery. An administrator directs backup software to endlessly take live images of a mission-critical machine
every fifteen minutes, automatically restoring them to a preconfigured, dedicated offline virtual machine which
can be located anywhere. If the production machine fails, the administrator can instantly switch on the virtual
machine for instant recovery of the lost application and all the data associated with it. The cost of setting up
and maintaining this fallback device is trivial because it uses existing resources. Even better, it’s several times
less costly than traditional replication solutions that involve acquiring, powering and maintaining a physical
machine.