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August 1998
When the IS Manager is Out
Recently at Imaging and Document Solutions we had a small moment of panic when an error message popped up saying our editorial server was almost full. We were in the middle of separating files out of a spreadsheet for this month's buyers' guide, and storage problems would not have been convenient.
Our IS manager, Freddie Golino, fixed the problem, but if he had been sick or on vacation, we would have had problems.
Handling this situation automatically is the raison d'etre for Stac's (San Diego, CA 619-794-4300) Replica 3, a $695 tape backup product for Novell NetWare and Windows NT servers. At a scheduled backup time once a day, the software replicates everything on a server to tape. It's a live server backup -- whatever work you're doing on the server continues while the backup takes place in the background. If the server crashes, it can be rebuilt from scratch automatically within a couple of hours. This is also called "bare-metal recovery."
"It's so simple that anybody can do disaster recovery," says Tom Toperczer, director of product management at Stac. "The instructions fit on a Post-It note."
In addition to the easy server recovery, Replica 3 also provides a central administrator with real-time status of all operating servers.
For companies that want to back up individual PC hard drives, another Stac product, Relica NDM (also starting at $695) works across the desktops and laptops in an enterprise. It replicates data on the hard drives onto a storage server. It can be integrated with an HSM product so that as data gets older it can be moved to optical disk or tape. The user sees a personal file archive device in Windows Explorer. If a file is lost, or for some reason an earlier version is required, the user selects the file from the archive and drags and drops it on to the hard drive or wherever they want to use it.
This product is good for companies that let employees install their own software and that, from time to time, experience crashes. Users can easily recreate their hard drives afterward.
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