Prepare for Disaster Recovery
by Diane Poremsky

Tech"Ed, April 9, 2002 Disaster recovery is on the minds of IT professionals like never before. At this year's Tech"Ed show in New Orleans, many products designed to ease the minds of administrators are being demonstrated.

UltraBac for Windows NT/2000, from UltraBac Software, allows you to perform live backups of open databases and shared files to disk or tape, with optional components for use with SQL and Exchange servers. You can backup data to any disk in a network including all types of removable media, and UltraBac allows for both GUI-based backups and command line backups. It writes events to the NT Event Log with unique identifiers for errors, completions, and so on, and supports both SMTP and MAPI e-mail notification. UltraBac also offers remote administration for updates, monitoring backups, backup job modifications, and event scheduling.

Veritas Software's Backup Exec products protect databases, applications, and other resources against all sorts of exposure, including application mistakes, operator error, disk failures, and hardware malfunction. They offer protection across Unix, Windows, and NetWare platform workgroup environments, as well as standalone computers and small peer-to-peer Windows networks. Backup MyPC is available for single computers, and Simple Backup provides data protection for home computers.

Other entries in the Veritas product line include clustering utilities, which you can use to build and manage scalable, clustered configurations to improve application performance and availability. Veritas replication utilities enable you to maintain up-to-date copies of data, and file system utilities support online backup, resizing, and defragmentation without interrupting data access.

Repair and recovery tools in the Administrator's Pak from Winternals Software allow you to repair crashed Windows systems and restore lost data. They include ERD Commander 2002, Disk Commander, NTFSDOS Professional, Remote Recover, and Monitoring Tools. Using ERD Commander 2002, you can boot dead systems and diagnose and repair unbootable systems. Disk Commander helps you reconstruct damaged or deleted files, and Remote Recover permits remote access to volumes and files on dead Windows systems using TCP/IP.

CommVault Galaxy, from CommVault Systems is a data- and storage-management solution with backup and recovery capabilities. The Galaxy solution offers an easy-to-use interface, with management capabilities, that presents a view of enterprise storage. CommVault Galaxy supports a variety of servers, including SQL, Exchange, Notes, Windows NT/2000, NetWare, and Linux. CommVault Galaxy is designed to protect Microsoft Cluster Server environments, supporting both active/passive and active/active configurations using a shared nothing model. It also provides support for SQL and Exchange servers deployed in clustered configurations.