We think the best backup strategy available today is a 2-step process based on the principle of BUDR (Backup Up, Disaster Recovery, often pronounced bud-r):
1. BU – protecting against critical hardware or software failure by backing up to a network storage unit that is directly connected to the network; and then
2. DR – protecting against a disaster event like theft or fire by backing up from that disk sub-system to an external source – either across the internet to a physically separate location, or to removable hard drives that are then manually taken off-site daily.

NetCare Remote Backup (powered by Acronis)
NetCare Remote Backup is a comprehensive backup and recovery service that ensures backups are done consistently and reliably. It provides regular backups of your server every night, so that the amount of data potentially lost is always minimized. This is complemented by an overnight backup of changes in your data across the internet to a secure offsite location (for instance your branch office server or a NetCare-approved third party backup provider). The whole backup process is monitored by our system and automatic alerts are generated if any problems occur.
 
This effectively means you’ve got two restore options available to you at all times – the on-site copy and the off-site copy.
 
We believe NetCare Remote Backup is the “absolute best” backup option. But, it can only be used when there is an SHDSL (synchronous) internet plan in place – the upload speeds of an ADSL plan are simply not fast enough to back up the amount of data that is stored on a server. Pricing for these faster internet plans have come down significantly over the last 12 months, and with the NBN rollout in the years to come, this option will become more and more viable.

NetCare Onsite Backup (powered by Acronis)
If the only cost-effective option for internet access at your location is an ADSL link, then our “second best” option is NetCare Onsite Backup. We still backup your servers every night so there is always an onsite disk backup available. But for the second step, instead of backing up across the internet, we backup to a series of external drives.
 
These drives are then swapped out every day by a trustworthy employee who also takes responsibility for taking the external disk media off-site, just like they may well do now with tapes. The big advantage over your current tape-based solution though is that even if tapes don’t get swapped over every day, a backup is still done every night to the onsite disk system.

The price for peace of mind
Both NetCare Remote Backup and NetCare Onsite Backup are provided as a service and can be cancelled at any time. The monthly service fee is $33, and includes all monitoring, configuration changes and software upgrades.
 
Additional off-site storage fees typically apply for NetCare Remote Backup, whilst our clients also need to purchase the appropriate removable disk drives for NetCare Onsite Backup. An indicative price for our standard disk backup hardware solution is $1600, including installation.

In my final blog post on server backup I'll post the answers to some common questions we get asked about our NetCare Backup services.

Today, there is a strong trend in the computer industry away from backing up to tape and towards backing up to disk. There are five main reasons for this:
1. In our experience, every tape backup drive fails at some point in its life. And when it does it’s a stressful time for all diagnosing the problem, convincing the manufacturer that its faulty and putting in place an interim solution until the replacement tape drive is installed; 
 2. The ever-increasing amount of data stored on a server means the time taken to back it all up onto tape is increasing. Sometimes the “backup window” continues into the working day, slowing down network performance for everyone. This problem gets even bigger when there is more than one server or when the amount of data grows over time and it no longer fits onto one tape;
3. Swapping tape cartridges on a daily basis involves a human process, and is thus prone to forgetfulness and mistakes;
4. These days, disk drives are not only cheaper than tape drives devices, they’re also far more reliable over the long term; and
5. Restoring data from tape will always be a clumsy, tedious, slow and mistake prone process. And all at the exact point in time when there’s pressure on to get everything operational again as soon as possible.
 
In a nutshell, the backup process and the restore process is a lot faster, a lot simpler and a lot safer with disk drives than it is with tape drives.

In my next blog I'll outline what I think is today's best server backup strategy.

NetCare ServerCare is a mix of both proactive and reactive services that we provide to all clients on our Essentials, Gold and Platinum plans. It’s not just an insurance policy – it also maximises our chances of nipping a problem in the bud because we actively monitor and respond to the event logs on your server(s) all day every day.

We can do this as a result of new remote monitoring software we installed recently. This software allows us to now monitor your hardware as well as your operating system.

And ServerCare extends beyond hardware failure to also cover your server for any catastrophic operating system failure that may occur.

Essentially, we do our absolute best to keep your server operating reliably and optimally and in the event that a worst case scenario does occur and your server ends up needing a full software rebuild, we will do it as quickly as we can as part of the ServerCare service. You do not receive an ugly bill for the rebuild.

There’s also a fantastic ServerCare feature that we use to ensure your downtime is minimized – we install specialized image copy software that makes daily copies of your complete server image. Following a catastrophic server failure, we use this image copy to get your server back up and running again within a few hours. To implement this we provide a high capacity external disk drive and we use this disk drive to store multiple image backups as an additional safety net to your normal backup process.

Initial installation and testing of NetCare ServerCare is $390 (plus GST) which includes the cost of the 2TB external hard disk drive.

ServerCare covers you for catastrophic server software failure caused by the following events:

- Catastrophic server hardware failure;

- Sudden power loss resulting in a server crashing; and

- Unrecoverable Operating System software corruption (for example a crash caused by a virus that has got through the anti-virus defences).

ServerCare is more than just an insurance policy. An insurance policy covers you for rectification if something bad happens. This is certainly a feature of ServerCare but it also goes one significant step further because it also reduces the chance of something bad happening in the first place.

NetCare recommends that all our clients use ServerCare in addition to their standard backup solution because of the additional peace-of-mind it offers.

I’d like to start this blog by declaring openly that I think the ProLiant range of servers are fantastically reliable, superbly engineered and designed from the inside out for high performance. They’ve been my favourite brand of server since I started providing them to clients in 1992.

The standard warranty that comes with every ML350 HP ProLiant server is three years, on-site next-business-day. In most case our clients elect to upgrade this at the time of purchase to a 4 hour response and/or a warranty extension to 4 years.

However, it’s important to clarify what the standard on-site warranty provided by HP actually covers. In two words – “hardware only”. So in the unlikely event that a hardware component in your server fails over the course of its warranty life, HP will come on-site and replace that hardware component in a quick and effective fashion.

Sometimes that’s not enough… Recently, a client of ours had a server crash late one afternoon. The 3 year old server was in a dusty environment, its power supply fan became blocked, the main board heated up and some components failed. An HP engineer was onsite early the next morning to replace the necessary parts and after testing, announced that the hardware was now operational.

Unfortunately for the client, whilst the server hardware was fixed, the software still wouldn’t operate. And fixing this part of the problem is not done by the HP engineer - someone else (read NetCare) needs to fix the software. This important detail is covered off in the fine print of the warranty agreement and is common to all manufacturers – not just HP.

Fixing a software problem at this point often involves a lot of work. If NetCare can get the server operating again within a few hours, then all is pretty good. But if there’s still no sign of life at the 4 hour mark, then a big, expensive and complicated decision needs to be made. Do we keep going trying to recover, or do we cut our losses and rebuild the server software from scratch, incurring a fee to the client of up to $4000? And that doesn’t begin to count the business cost due to lost productivity.

In my next blog, I'll introduce our solution to this significant problem - NetCare ServerCare.