Government Computer News
by John Breeden II
March 22, 2004
When disaster strikes, image can be everything.
That's the approach UltraBac Software of Bellevue, Wash.,
takes. The company's UltraBac Disaster Recovery Gold uses disk-imaging
technology to create a backup of Microsoft Windows servers and PCs.
Rather than perform a traditional file-by-file backup, UBDR
Gold takes a snapshot of a hard drive or storage medium. In the event of a hard
drive crash, a user or systems administrator simply boots the failed machine
from the UltraBac Gold CD to pull the last known good image of the drive across
the network.
Because the backup is an image and not a file-by-file backup,
the restoration process can be completed in minutes, UltraBac officials said.
"We recently redesigned the buffering algorithm, and we have
dramatically improved the performance," said Paul Bunn, UltraBac's chief
technology officer. "We are now restoring on a typical server between 1G and
1.2G a minute over the network. Your typical system partition might represent 6G
to 8G of data, so that's a six- to eight-minute restore."
The snapshot doesn't create a physical copy of all the data on
a drive but rather constructs pointers that map files and directories to
specific disk blocks. The process is often called copy-on-write technology.
"It's been around in the mainframe and VMS world for eons,
since at least the late '60s and early '70s," Bunn said. "We just updated that
technology and rewrote it for the Windows environment. What our snapshot does is
freeze the view of the drive as we're backing it up."
One federal agency that has been testing UBDR expects to save
time and expense by using the software to backup its drives at remote sites
around the world.
When a server crashes at a site, agency officials often have
to dispatch a technician to the site—at a cost of thousands of dollars—to
rebuild the drive and recover mission-critical data. Now, UBDR software will let
on-site personnel restore a drive simply by inserting the backup CD.
UBDR Gold runs under all Windows operating systems, including
XP, 2000 and 2003.
The software also can be used for hardware deployment. Users
can image one machine and clone that machine to others, UltraBac officials said.
UBDR Gold offers Blowfish encryption to ensure that backups
protect proprietary and confidential data.
Other enhancements to the latest release are backup and
restore from a File Transfer Protocol server and an IBM Tivoli storage manager
device, Bunn said.
"For FTP you can actually do an image backup to an FTP server
and restore directly from the FTP server," he said. "All you need is TCP/IP
connectivity, and you're good to go."
UBDR Gold also incorporates a new restore wizard that walks
the user or system administrator through a step-by-step restore process.
A user simply boots the failed machine from the UBDR Gold disk
and uses the wizard to grab the latest backup image of the drive. When the
transfer is complete, the user reboots the machine and is back in business.
When a machine fails, "it's a very stressful time so we try to
make [the restoration process] as simple and logical as possible," Bunn said.
UltraBac officials said General Services Administration
schedule pricing for UBDR Gold starts at $696.50.
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