Veritas showcase server healing software

Veritas has completed its round of upgrades to its software product group with the release of the new, enhanced version of its Bare Metal Restore product.

According to the vendor, version 4.6 of the product includes "dissimilar system restore," which helps get critical business data back online faster and more cost effectively than traditional recovery methods.

It does so by automating the rapid recovery of heterogeneous server environments. Bare Metal Resource software cuts recovery time by automating system and software configuration processes, bringing systems quickly back online.

The new dissimilar system restore feature allows users to recover a Windows system that has crashed or failed to completely different hardware than the hardware on which it was initially installed. This includes different network interface adaptors, mass storage devices, video adaptors, motherboards and CPU quantities, even components from competing hardware vendors.

The new version of the software also contains the ability to restore a server to a point in time before the last backup, a critical function for data corruption or virus situations.

"Organisations continue to take a hard look at ways to cost-effectively increase their resilience to unplanned downtime, including downtime caused by disasters or just routine hardware failures," said Dianne McAdam, senior analyst at Data Mobility Group. "Principal to reducing the cost of downtime is software that can automate recovery of the organisation's data from one server to another, even if the two systems are not identical. This capability reduced the time to get systems back up and running without requiring the CIO to keep a data centre full of unused systems at the ready."

Bare Metal Restore automates the steps needed to recover entire servers from component or server failures, simplifying recovery on multiple platforms and eliminates the need to manually reinstall operating systems and reduces system recovery to as few as two steps.

"Veritas has removed the boundaries that require the restore to be done to a server of the same configuration. Users now have the flexibility to restore another server without having to standardise on one particular configuration," added McAdam.

Bare Metal Restore 4.6 has a browser-based interface for IBM AIX, HP-UX, Windows and Sun Solaris server recovery.

Bob Maness, senior director of product marketing at Veritas, outlined what the vendor was trying to bring to the party with the new version of the application.

"Our goal is to help organisations both minimise downtime and simplify complex IT administration. Bare Metal Restore leads the market in this respect by making it faster and simpler to respond to hardware component failures, using a common interface across platforms."

When integrated with NetBackup, Veritas' backup and recovery software, Bare Metal Restore offers fully automated restore for complete data protection in multi-platform environments.

Bare Metal Restore 4.6 will be available in mid-June at no additional cost to current Bare Metal Restore customers with support and maintenance contracts, while for new customers, it starts at US$900 per Windows client and $1,000 per UNIX client. It also requires NetBackup software to operate.

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