World-Class Application Backup and Recovery

A common expression among true information technology experts is: “IT amateurs backup; IT professionals recover.” The expression is popular because having a solution that can just backup your applications and applications’ data is ineffective. If you have a problem and you cannot quickly and easily recover your applications or your application server, from your backups, is your backup solution any good at all?

Every server based application should be properly backed up and easily recoverable to prevent losses from data corruption; unforeseen disasters, such as a hardware failure; and from any type of user error, such as accidental file deletion. The expense and sheer complexity of implementing traditional general purpose servers and third party tape backup solutions are common reasons why several small and medium size businesses do not have an effective strategy for backing up and recovering their applications and application servers.

Nitix Application Edition makes it easy for any small or medium size business to backup its Linux-based server applications and, if need be, perform either an application restoration or a complete application server restoration .

Application Restoration

Applications that run on servers are usually applications that multiple users connect to simultaneously and/or applications that store information in a database. Examples of server based applications commonly found in small and medium size businesses include: accounting, inventory tracking, client billing, and patient management systems. These server-based applications tend to be extremely important to the normal operation of the businesses that use them.

What would happen if an application running your server stops working properly? Perhaps you had to patch the underlying operating system due to a security issue; perhaps someone changed some configuration settings; or perhaps the application stopped working for no apparent reason. Will your business be down for a long time, or can you recover quickly? If your server-based applications run on a general purpose server the answer is “it depends.” How quickly can you figure out exactly what the problem is? Is it the application; is it the operating system; is it a configuration issue; or is it something else? Once you determine the root cause of the problem, do you know how to fix it, and if so, how long will it take?

Choose to run your server-based applications on Nitix Virtual Server and there is always a quick and easy way to get your applications working again. With Nitix’s built-in idb backup feature, if any one of your applications should stop working properly, you can restore the Nitix Virtual Server environment to the way it was before the application issue occurred. For example, if you suspect that an update you applied to an application might have caused the application to stop working properly, click a button and restore Nitix Virtual Server to the way it was before the update was applied. It is that easy, because Nitix’s built-in idb backup feature can backup Nitix Virtual Server and all your applications as often as every fifteen minutes.

Application Server Restoration

In the event that a traditional general purpose server needs to be completely recovered (perhaps from a hardware failure or from a disaster, like a flood), typically the operating system must first be restored, then patched to the latest version, then the backup software needs to be restored and patched to the latest version, and then the application and application data can be recovered, from the previous night’s tape backup. Depending on the amount of data and the complexity of the application operating environment, it is not uncommon for this type of restoration to take anywhere from several hours to a couple of days to perform, which is especially problematic if the server being restored is your only server. Once the restoration of the server is complete, several hours of data might have been lost. For example, if the overnight tape backup used to restore data from completed its daily backup a 3:00AM, and a hardware failure occurred at 6:00PM that same afternoon, an entire business day’s worth of data will have been lost.

With Nitix’s System-ER disaster recovery technology and the appropriate replacement hardware, a Nitix-powered server can be recovered from any type hardware failure into a functional state, in just 2-minutes. Once a Nitix server reaches a functional state, it is ready to perform application services again. Next, Nitix’s idb backup feature will restore all the data that needs to be put onto the replacement server, including the data required to restore the Nitix Virtual Server environment, so that applications will run properly again. Nitix’s idb backup feature restores data a rate of approximately forty gigabytes per hour, which means that a compete server recovery for a typical small and medium size business customer will be finished in less than a couple of hours. Because Nitix’s idb backup feature performs backups as often as every fifteen minutes, no matter when a hardware failure occurs, when the restoration of the server is complete, no more than fifteen minutes of data will be lost.

Click here to learn more about Integrated Autonomic Security