It’s Monday at 10:00 a.m. Suddenly, after a flash of lightning outside, your desktop computer screen goes blank. A few minutes later, the power comes back on, but your server won’t boot because it’s taken a direct jolt through the network cable plugged into it, which circumvented the Uninterruptable Power Supply from which it gets its power. You call your IT guy and he says “I’m sorry, but it’s going to take us 4 days to get a new server and rebuild it from backup. Your first thought is….. Are you insane, my business can’t close for 4 days! I’ll lose a hundred thousand dollars in 4 days!
This may sound like a million to one scenario, but it happens at least a couple of times a year among our set of clients. Not all lightning strikes, but flooding, roof failures, hardware failures and stolen equipment can cause you to start down the road of a full server replacement. The reason it happens is that until recently, there was no way to prevent it. If your server has a catastrophic failure and must be replaced, the process we go through is this….
- Design, configure and get your approval on a new server (4 hours)
- Order and take delivery of the box (at least 1 day, usually 2)
- Build the physical box, load the operating system (4 hours)
- Download all of your backup data from Cloud or local backup (1 day)
- Re-install all of your applications from CD (assuming you have all the disks and keys, 8 hours)
- Test applications, data, setup printers and directory maps, e-mail, etc…(8 hours)
Above is the best case scenario where you have good backups, all of your installation media and license keys, pay for next day shipping, and we have a technician available to work on your issue non-stop (not always the case if we’ve had 10 other clients call after a lightning storm with the same problem and you’re the 11th). If you haven’t performed occasional test restores of backup data and verified that you’re getting good backups, it could be MUCH worse, up to and including the possibility that you may NEVER get your critical business data back. Even in the best case scenario, if the server crashed at 4:59 p.m., you could still lose an entire day’s worth of business data because your last backup was performed the previous night.
This nightmare doesn’t need to be yours. In the last couple of years, a new technology has entered the IT market. It is called a Backup and Disaster Recover Server, or BDR. It’s not that much more expensive than what you used to pay for a backup tape drive and Backup Exec software, but the improvements in reliability and time to recovery are astounding. Instead of being out of business for 3-5 days, we could have you back up and working in potentially less than an hour.
The reason for the dramatic difference is that your BDR is taking snapshots of your server about every 15 minutes. Since the BDR contains a virtualized copy of your entire server, all we have to do is spin up that virtualized copy of your server inside the BDR, connect your users to it, and you’re back in business. You might have lost only 15 minutes worth of data and been down for 1-2 hours. It’s still going to take us a few days to get your new replacement server in and get it running, but you don’t really care because you’re doing business on the BDR throughout our main server replacement process.
If you would like to have this peace of mind, call us. We will be happy to discuss this option with you in detail.
David Daichendt
V.P. Operations
Micro Doctor, Inc.
(330) 898-2100 x106
