We have many small business customers who have just a single server (usually Microsoft Small Business Server) that runs their business. Naturally, these customers are very concerned about their only server. The loss of that machine could be very damaging for them so they take data backup very seriously. Traditional data backup is fine but, if they were to completely lose their server, it could take a couple of days to get them back on-line again. With the importance of Email to businesses and their absolute reliance of IT systems in general, this sort of delay is unacceptable; a better solution was required.

 

One solution would be to use some kind of server mirroring technology or off-site replication technology but these techniques are too expensive for SMEs as they require lots of hardware and expensive software. What’s needed is a great backup solution that will replicate machine images off-site to our data centre and yet not cost the earth. Thankfully, such software exists and our tests show that it works beautifully!

 

We’re now able to take complete server images (once every 15 minutes if required), copy them off-site over an existing ADSL connection and maintain a live virtual machine image that’s ready-to-go in the event of a serious failure. We reckon that if a customer was to lose a server overnight, we could be on-site with a working replacement server by 11am! That server could be a copy of their machine up to 15 minutes before the old server was lost.

 

It’s really impressive technology that we’re about to implement across a three site, six server business in the Midlands. We’ll be using the technology to protect their file, Exchange, database and terminal servers.

 

Once this solution is running and settled, we’ll be offering the solution to other SME customers. Drop us a line if you’re interested  in hearing more about it.

 

Rest assured we’ll be blogging widely and at length about this technology as we believe it’s really important to our customers and SMEs in general.

 

Jason Timmins – Technical Director – Micro-Business Maintenance Ltd – Business IT Support