Restore Any Size Machine in Seconds? VirtualBoot Makes It Easy.

Losing data due to a malicious attack, hardware failure, or other disaster is usually one of the worst days in the life of an IT professional. No matter what the cause, when downtime hits every second counts—because every second is so expensive. IDC says the average cost of an infrastructure failure is $100,000 per hour, while unplanned application downtime costs businesses an average of as much as $2.5 billion per year. Say disaster does strike and you lose data? With many backup and disaster recovery (BDR) solutions you’d failover to secondary storage and spin up a new machine from a backup. Then you’d typically restore that data by migrating it back to your primary storage with a software product like VMware® VMotion™. Sounds easy, but there are a few big problems with that approach.

Secondary Storage Can Be Slow

While secondary storage can be less expensive, it’s also likely to be slower than your primary storage. Latency then becomes a big problem while you’re restoring data if the applications you’re running from your secondary storage demand performance. And even, then it may take hours to fully restore your data to your primary storage. That usually means working after hours to get it done so you don’t interfere with production. Meanwhile, your users are probably complaining that their computers are slow at best.

Recovery in Seconds

StorageCraft® VirtualBoot™—a key component of StorageCraft® ShadowXafe® data protection software—takes a different approach to data recovery. With VirtualBoot you can boot a backup image of a system volume from a failed server or workstation into a virtual machine (VM), restoring any size machine in seconds. Yes, seconds. And you can choose the backup that was taken at the point in time you need, prior to the failure. Even better, your data is immediately available for use and is restored to the original machine and location within your primary storage. Goodbye latency—you’re team is right back to work.

Intelligent Restoration

The secret to VirtualBoot is its intelligent I/O filter that reads ahead in the incoming data and identifies prioritized data, sending it seamlessly back to primary storage before it’s needed. Here’s the logic: Out of a multi-terabyte machine, it’s likely only a few hundred megabytes are needed to get your system turned back on, and only a gigabyte or two will be needed to get your services back up and running. VirtualBoot’s heuristic ability to recognize patterns means your users never wait for data while your system is being restored.

Testing Made Easy

Because VirtualBoot makes it easy to boot a backup image into a virtual machine, it also makes it easy to test your backups to make sure they’re protected. VirtualBoot loads the operating system, applications, and data into the VM so you can quickly and reliably verify that your backups will work as expected. VirtualBoot makes testing new or upgraded applications easy, too. Just use VirtualBoot to launch a VM of the production system’s latest backup file and install the application on the new VM. Then you can evaluate the software’s performance within your actual IT environment without any risk to your production system.

Always Have Access to Historical Data

When you need to access archived data—triggered by an investigation, audit, or other event, for example—you may no longer have the specific software required to open old files. VirtualBoot eliminates that problem by letting you boot up an archived backup image, with the resulting VM containing both the data and the application you need to open the files.

It’s Like Magic

VirtualBoot was named a Gold Award co-winner for data protection at VMworld for good reason. Some say it works like magic because all of the steps and processes you once needed to recover have simply disappeared. So, while you’ll still need to bring all of your core data and other resources back to your primary storage over time, with VirtualBoot you’re up and running in no time. Ready to make recovery a snap? Schedule your custom demo today.