Earlier this week we had a quick but violent storm front that knocked out our power. A client server went unaffected due to the attached UPS, however, our own server took a hit.
Let’s just say that our server had difficulties reviving itself. Fortunately, we have our disaster recovery ‘Shadow Protect’ configured and this allowed us to quickly restore a very recent server image. If we needed, we could have restored a virtual image of our server to ‘dis-similar hardware’and run on the virtualized system. This may even be on a cloud based system. You can not do that with a basic back-up even if you have a Windows Server image (that requires similar hardware).
The lesson to be learned is this, backups are not the same as true disaster recovery style virtualized server images. If, in the event of a fire, theft, flood, storm, plague, or some other act of God, your firm would suffer if it required significant length of time for your server environment to be re-created and then have programs re-installed and then files restored then you should investigate true Disaster Recovery.