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Simple and Effective Disaster Recovery with Datto Siris

Eric Christiansen

3 min read

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Proper Disaster Recovery (DR) has been out of reach of smaller organizations for many years. Most firms have had to resort to sending backup tapes offsite. Everyone knows the main problems with tape backups: finicky hardware and human error (not changing or sending tapes offsite).

Datto has an excellent solution that lets smaller organizations have a proper Disaster Recovery solution that will keep them operating during a disaster. Kraft Kennedy has implemented this solution at several clients and it has already proven itself on multiple occasions.

In a complete disaster that results in a total loss of location, recovery times are exceedingly long. Servers have to be purchased and the entire network has to be recovered (assuming you even have a location to house your equipment). The ideal case is to have a secondary location where all of your data replicates with servers ready to take over in case of a failure in your primary location.

Kraft Kennedy has been helping larger firms do this for years. We help design a backup datacenter, its infrastructure, and the processes that replicate all data from one site to another. This is an expensive solution that has not been viable for many smaller organizations. Until now.

Datto Siris provides organizations with a backup datacenter with automatic offsite replication for a fraction of the cost and administration of a full DR site. The only hardware that needs to be purchased is a local appliance that resides at the client site. The size of the appliance is based on the number of servers and amount of data to be backed up. All servers get backed up to the local appliance over the local network. Then the backups are securely replicated over the Internet to Datto’s datacenters on the East and West Coast. For clients with large amounts of data, the initial full backup can be shipped to Datto on encrypted NASs that they provide at no cost. Once the initial full backup is transferred offsite, only incremental backups need to be transferred over the Internet.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Datto Siris provides more than just off site backups. All of the backups are fully bootable replicas of the servers being backed up. In the event of a disaster, all of a client’s servers can be powered on in Datto’s datacenter.

Datto Siris isn’t only used in full site disasters. The local appliance can also be used to boot virtual clones of local servers. If you have a hardware failure of a local server, you can run just that one server virtually on the Datto Siris appliance. When ready, you can recover back to the original hardware, different hardware, or export the system as a virtual machine in VMware or Hyper-V format.

Datto Siris also provides local and cloud-based file restores. Systems are backed up every hour by default, which is much better than the once-a-day backup of traditional backup software. All offsite replicas and backups are encrypted. Additional passphrase encryption can be enabled for systems that require additional security. This will also encrypt the local backups and will require the encryption pass phrase in order to recover any data.

The solution is very simple to implement and manage. Many of our clients have all of their data backed up to the local appliance within a few days of receiving the appliance. Off Site backups are usually completed within a week or two. This is significantly faster than building out your own DR datacenter. Maintenance is also much simpler. With the replicated server model, you don’t have to worry about patching or maintaining servers in the DR location. All backups and restores are managed through a clean and simple-to-use Web Interface.