Digital Bandwidth ImageThere are many factors to consider when it comes to how fast your systems recover from a backup. Are you recovering from incremental, differential, or full backups? Backup schemas such as these can affect your recovery times. Then there is recovery from on prem or the cloud, the size of your databases, hard drives, files, etc. and bandwidth. The 3-2-1 rule is the gold standard for backups but at the end of the day, it’s bandwidth and network capacity that have a big impact on your recovery times. During a DR event when data must be recovered, bandwidth and network capacity need to be your friend, and many times, they can slow you down.

In an emergent situation where time is of the essence, here are 2 ways to implement your backup strategy to avoid bandwidth slowing you down:

Same Site Failover

This network implementation is where backup data is sent to a host on prem. Zerto is typically utilized in a cloud failover scenario to provide low RPO’s and RTO’s for failover. But Zerto can also be configured to build replica servers within the same vCenter cluster. This allows for quick file level restore as well as another option for on-premise failover as well. This can help with network complexity in a case where the issue is with the virtual machine, but the hardware and site are still in working condition. Zerto does real time replication for granular recovery in single digit minutes, and with the ECE license, complete recovery has never been faster.

Instant Server Restore

Acronis Cyber Cloud Backup has an Instant Restore function that allows for this to happen. Instead of moving the data from the backup storage, the storage is mounted as a datastore to the hypervisor. Acronis then builds the virtual ma-chine around the static data that is stored in backup. This allows the server to be booted quickly, getting your end users back in the game. While they are working, a process called “finalization” merges the changes they are making with the static backup data and moves everything to production storage. Acronis is a versatile backup solution supporting 20+ mediums and can backup O365, email and GSuite.

 

General Suggestions:

Don’t be afraid to ask your carrier for a bandwidth bump when you have an emergency. Many service providers will be more than willing to burst your bandwidth to a higher level in a disaster situation. We can do the same on our side at Net3 as well! Again, the 3-2-1 backup rule is recommended and in both cases, we would still recommend a place offsite for that 3rd copy of data – like the cloud. But having shell servers on hand or vm’s ready to be built in the event of a DR event, is both easy and viable to start quickly bringing your business applications back online.