A good plan is a plan that is tested.

While we monitor our backups around the clock for successful completion. As part of your organisations wider ‘Disaster Recovery Policy’ it is important to have provisions in place in order to test the backup of your servers. So in a worse case scenario you can be confident that you can restore a server in its entirety.

The most common way this can be achieved is by Virtual Disaster Recovery testing {VDR} where you play out a scenario that the server(s) in question are no longer viable for any given reason and your I.T team looks to bring them back on a virtualised platform such as Hyper-V or VMWare. The issue here is that it can be very time consuming from procuring the hardware, performing the Disaster Recovery and documenting the process

Of companies surveyed in the last 2 years:

Only 50% are confident 100% of data can be restored per SLA

I would challenge any one to even give an assurance that high if a entire server disaster recovery is not something they have even tested.

So with that taken into consideration, does this mean to give further confidence that you need to do a lengthy and time consuming VDR Test.

Well….. No ….. What if we told you we could automate it for you at a very negligible cost ? Freeing up your time for something else.

Enter: Automated – Virtual Disaster Recovery {A-VDR}

If you already use Meta Backup to backup your servers not only do we monitor them round the clock but we can also bolt on Automated Virtual Disaster Recovery.

This is an automated service where we will periodically restore data to a secure hosted facility located in the same geographical region as where the backup data is stored.

The Recovery Testing restore is ran every 30 days and with each restore, a virtual machine is automatically created. Once the Virtual Machine has been created, we will boot it and create a screenshot to check that the Virtual Machine is bootable, then send this screenshot to the Backup Management Console so that your team can check it. We can even automate an email which gives a period status of the A-VDR’s

The above image shows a Virtual Machine which was automatically created from the backups for one of our customers.

The virtual machines that are created as part of Recovery Testing are purged once the restore is completed and the screenshot taken. such as the image above. Periodically testing via a restore can give further confidence in that should a full restore be needed then it can be carried out.

For more information on how to add this to your Meta backup Service or to have Meta Eagle backing up your server estate then email sales@metaeagle.co.uk


Lee Robinson

Co-Founder and Director at Meta Eagle

0 Comments

Leave a Reply

Avatar placeholder