Covenco launches Online Backup service with Fail-Over to Virtualised DR Infrastructure

The Covenco Service has been designed to cater for all possible backup and recovery scenarios, and the varying recovery time expectations of customers. It recognises that many customers, have already invested heavily in backup hardware and software, or require outright ownership, but wish to utilise DR services for managed fail-over in the event of a serious disruption.

Gurdip Sohal, Sales Director, said, “Customers demand varied Recovery Time Objectives, some measured in minutes for critical servers. We have designed a scalable model that will deliver solutions ranging from local disk-to-disk backup with off-site replication, all the way to high availability at the customer’s site replicating to our virtualised DR infrastructure where we can fail-over the entire server estate to satisfy the most demanding RTOs”.

Sohal continues, “We developed the solution in response to the bad experiences of many customers to other online cloud services, where the quality and speed of the recovery service fell short of expectations, and where costs were drastically increasing year on year”.

“Many of these cloud backup services were set up to provide file recovery on a ‘cost per GB per month’ model for domestic customers, and then extended their reach into the commercial market. As many business customers have found to their cost, there is a world of difference and pain between the loss of a 30Mb file and the complete loss of all your servers and SANs. You can’t recover 2TB of data over the internet in any meaningful time. For a business it’s all about the speed and quality of recovery and the reliability of the DR service at the time of invocation.”

Customers who have already invested in disk-to-disk backup solutions can replicate to the Covenco DR facility where, if or when needed, their servers can be recovered to a VMware Host infrastructure, enabling managed fail-over. This will allow the customer to resume normal operational capability while they begin the process of recovering their local infrastructure. Should they require a complete hardware replacement, Covenco can recover their entire server estate to new hardware and ship to their site.

To complement this service, Covenco customers can relocate their key end user staff to a selection of Covenco Workplace Recovery Centres around the UK, where they can re-establish essential operations allowing the business to continue trading whilst the crisis management team look to replace core facilities.