Leverage Your DR Site for Validated Offsite Backups or Centralized Backups

Mitigate risk and lower costs by letting your disaster recovery replica server double as a server for performing an offsite backup. CA XOsoft's patent-pending CA XOsoft™ Assured Recovery technology combined with state-of-the-art replication allows a backup to be performed on an offsite replica server using the same application-based validation as would occur on the production server, without the additional costs or security risks of transporting the backup to the DR facility.

For branch offices, businesses can accrue a double benefit by centralizing the offsite backups of multiple branch offices at a single facility to significantly reduce the need for sophisticated IT support at every location.

Learn more about how to use your DR replica to perform offsite backups — download our white paper: Centralized and Offsite Backup.

Utilizing the Replica Server in the Backup Role

With replication and Assured Recovery (AR), you can add two layers of protection to your disaster recovery capability at once:

• Remote replication for disaster recovery with automated failover for business continuance and fully validated offsite backup.
• In the case of branch offices, this same mechanism can be used to create a backup replica at a central site, with centrally managed backups, for an additional benefit.

Example Scenario

[See Example]A production Microsoft SQL Server at the primary site is protected against disaster by CA XOsoft High Availability (formerly CA XOsoft WANSyncHA) with CA XOsoft Assured Recovery, which replicates all changes as they occur and monitors the health of both the production server and the SQL services and databases. CA XOsoft Assured Recovery is configured to perform testing daily at 1am. After testing is done, it is configured to execute a script called Daily_Backup.vbs that puts SQL server into backup state and triggers a backup. In addition, a local snapshot is made using Microsoft Volume Shadow Copy Service for more rapid recovery.

Understand the Options to Mitigate Risk

Your ability to respond effectively to a disaster depends on the depth of protection that your systems offer. For application and data servers, depth of protection essentially means maintaining multiple layers of protection. Maintaining an offsite backup introduces new costs and risks associated with transporting backup tapes to a secondary location.

Generate validated offsite backups at your DR site

• CA XOsoft Replication (formerly CA XOsoft WANSync) + AR allows application data to be tested and backed up at the remote location, avoiding the cost and complexity of transporting backup tapes.
• Use a remote office as your DR site to further reduce cost

Simultaneous DR Protection and Backup Consolidation for Remote Offices

For companies with multiple sites, even maintaining a local backup can be a significant cost since backups must be managed at each local site individually. It is neither cost-effective to maintain sophisticated IT personnel at every location, nor is it safe to place the burden on non-IT staff for whom performing and verifying backups are unwanted and onerous tasks. As a result, these tasks are as likely to be skipped as not, putting critical corporate data at risk.

Consolidate remote-office backups in the data center

• CA XOsoft Replication + AR automatically transfers changes as they occur
• Management of replication and backup remains in data center
• Provides DR capability for remote servers at the same time

Validate the Replica Server Environment Without Disrupting IT Production Systems

Unfortunately, replicated data does not naturally lend itself to use for backups or snapshots since there is no way to ensure that the data is in a consistent, backup-ready state at the time a backup is taken. On the production server, this is accomplished by directly involving the application — the application is generally put into "backup state", which means that it applies any accumulated changes to its internal database and then begins accumulating new changes in a separate location while the backup or snapshot is taking place. A similarly backup-ready state can be achieved by performing a clean shutdown of the application — not something you can afford to do on your production server!

The unique patent-pending technology in the CA XOsoft Assured Recovery product changes this because the application may be backed up from a fully validated state that is known to be backup-ready.

At no point during testing or backup is your production server impacted, and your disaster recovery protection continues throughout.

CA XOsoft Assured Recovery allows for in-depth testing of the recoverability of the application on a replica server without any disruption to the production server, to the replication process, or to the automated failover protection mechanisms that are in place.