Backup and Disaster Recovery

For Backup and Disaster Recovery Comtec propose a hybrid (onsite and cloud) based solution which will provide a robust and ultra-reliable system and provide the customer with the peace of mind that business critical functions will be available whatever happens, whenever it happens.

Fig. 1 – Overview of Backup and Business Continuity

Every day the operational servers will be backed up to a local Datto SIRIS Appliance on-premise and from here the backup is replicated to the cloud, hosted at another Datacentre in the UK, this gives you both the speed of a local appliance alongside the resilience of the cloud (see Fig. 1).

Fig. 2 – Hybrid DR Solution

What does this mean for you if your Site becomes unavailable?

If the  site were to become unavailable, the procedure will be to failover to your backups held securely offsite, as the cloud will remain available and rapidly accessible.

Fig. 3 – Disaster Scenario

The cloud will act as the platform for the systems and will on-demand run a virtual copy of them until you’re ready to restore the information back to replacement or repaired hardware.

When the systems are run in the cloud there are a couple of options to connect you to them. Typically, a Virtual Private Network (VPN) for site-to-site which is used to connect an entire office to your now virtual systems or Point-to-Point (used to connect multiple end points i.e. Employees working from home to your now virtual systems. If the situation requires it, both options can be implemented; getting you up and running at speed.

Backup verification

By using Inverse Chain Technology™, the backup process eliminates the area where most problems arise in the traditional backup process: the backup chain. The appliance takes data and converts it directly into a virtual machine each time a backup occurs. The most recent backup image is always the base image and does not rely on past incrementals to restore data.

Since each backup is a fully bootable virtual machine, there is no need for a conversion to occur before performing a restore. With no complicated rollup or restore processes, data is always available immediately both on-site and off-site. A screenshot alert can then be sent directly to Comtec to confirm the backup. This is a unique feature of the solution.

Each time a backup occurs data is saved in a universal virtual file format (VMDK). These backups are not dependent on previous snapshots allowing for freedom over changing retention and deleting snapshots without resetting the chain or dropping a new base image. Since each backup is a fully bootable virtual machine, there is no need for a conversion to occur before performing a restore.

The backup and DR solution allows servers to be spun up in a couple of minutes giving a very short RTO.  Because the solution uses incremental changes from snapshots it allows multiple backups to be performed during the day, shortening the RPO time down.

Business Continuity

The proposed solution caters for recovery from data loss, data corruption, local restore to point in time due to processing errors and disaster scenarios relating to loss of access to the datacentre.