RecoverTrac™ Technology

Automated, service-oriented disaster recovery

Any Service, Any Time, Any Place with RecoverTrac Technology

RecoverTrac™ Disaster Recovery

RecoverTrac™ technology is an integral component of FalconStor® StorGuard. By providing service-oriented, automated data disaster recovery, the RecoverTrac tool enables the recovery of critical business application servers and associated data volumes in seconds, rather than hours or days.

RecoverTrac supports mixed physical and virtual server environments and offers the flexibility to recover locally or remotely.

HIGHLIGHTS

  • Standard feature of FalconStor StorGuard
  • Recovers data in minutes rather than hours or days
  • Supports any-to-any recovery for physical and virtual environments, including like and unlike devices
  • Defines protection policies on individual server, department, or global basis
  • Automates complex disaster recovery tasks, including testing and operational failover/failback
  • Intelligent failback of new and existing data enables fast, accurate recovery
  • Integrates with VMware vSphere, VMware ESX(i) Server, and Microsoft Hyper-V for automated virtual server provisioning at recovery site
  • Wizard-based mapping defines relationships between servers, applications, storage volumes, networking, and operational dependencies

THE NEED FOR AUTOMATED DISASTER RECOVERY

Most organizations rely on multiple applications, server platforms, networking protocols, storage systems, and other IT resources to operate their business. Unfortunately, service interruptions can occur due to hurricanes and other natural disasters, local and regional power grid failures, and human errors or malicious actions. Rebuilding this infrastructure at a remote data center is challenging, with costs and losses that average well over US $100,000 per hour.

Many vendors and customers mistakenly believe that replicating a secondary instance of data constitutes disaster recovery. However, although replication is an important part of recovery, true disaster recovery entails a multitude of complex requirements.

SERVICE-ORIENTED DATA PROTECTION AND DISASTER RECOVERY

Administrators are required to deliver specific services, such as email, web portal, or sales force automation. These can be very complex systems – such as web servers talking to collaboration software, or databases running on Linux and Microsoft Windows. IT organizations need a comprehensive disaster recovery strategy that includes policies for functions such as backup, archiving, retention, failover, and failback, all running together as a service.

Service-oriented data protection matches data protection to the way data centers manage IT. With RecoverTrac technology, organizations can protect all of the elements of a specific service as one interrelated group.

SYSTEM, SERVICE AND SITE MIGRATION

RecoverTrac technology addresses the recovery needs of individual systems, complete services, or entire data centers. Whether an organization is performing migration, testing patches, rolling out new services, or recovering data, RecoverTrac technology provides the flexibility data centers need to optimize environments while reducing operational costs and minimizing disruptions.

Application awareness ensures that when a system is restored, it comes back completely, with full transactional integrity.

EASY RESOURCE VISIBILITY

RecoverTrac technology supports multiple sites, either locally within a single data center or geographically distributed and enables a systematic definition of all resources in any environment.

An intuitive management console offers instant visibility to hosts, clusters, recovery jobs, and hypervisor servers, as well as data centers, storage servers, and sites. Users can add resources or resource groups into any of these categories via easy-to-use wizards.

LIGHTNING FAST

In a real emergency, the only thing that matters is getting your data center back up and running RecoverTrac technology enables you to recover a single machine in minutes, and can perform up to five parallel recovery jobs by default. This number can be increased when using faster hardware.

SERVICE FAILOVER AND FAILBACK

Regardless of how or where an error occurs, automated failover and failback is vital for continuous data and service availability.

RecoverTrac technology automates failover and failback, shutting down affected hosts at the primary site, booting up target hosts and applications at the recovery site, and reversing the direction of replication.

Intelligent Failback replicates both the recovered data and any new data created at the recovery site back to the production site.

Failover-Failback with RecoverTrac technology

VIRTUALLY ANYWHERE

RecoverTrac technology works seamlessly in VMware and Microsoft Hyper-V environments. Intuitive wizards help create hypervisor servers and virtual machines (VM) at any location. RecoverTrac technology leverages VMware programming interfaces for on demand VM creation, so there is no need to create expensive target VMs that will likely lie around unused. This reduces VMware licensing costs and overhead at the disaster recovery site.

RecoverTrac technology supports heterogeneous environments, eliminating costly vendor lock in and maximizing return on investment (ROI) by enabling an organization to leverage existing hardware.

Administrators can use any combination of physical-to-physical (P2P), physical-to-virtual (P2V), virtual-to-virtual (V2V), or virtual-to-physical (V2P) recovery between similar or dissimilar machines.

AWARD-WINNING REPLICATION

Patented MicroScan™ technology from FalconStor delivers up to 95% savings in network traffic over traditional site-to-site replication methods. By comparing data at the block level and only replicating changes, MicroScan technology reduces the amount of data required to be replicated and speeds replication and recovery. This drastically reduces network bandwidth requirements as well as storage costs.

AN EXTRA LAYER OF PROTECTION FOR PRODUCTION SYSTEMS

RecoverTrac technology enables non-disruptive testing of recovery jobs directly from the management console. Every aspect of a recovery job can be executed in test mode, without impacting production applications or data. This allows administrators to discover missing servers, improperly configured network settings, or overlooked dependencies.

In addition, this offers an extra layer of protection for critical production systems by enabling IT teams to test software updates prior to rolling them into a production environment.

Furthermore, by enabling P2V recovery, such as during a hardware repair, RecoverTrac technology can ensure maximum uptime for production systems.

PLATFORM REQUIREMENTS

For a complete list of approved devices, please refer to the certification matrix.