Plan B Disaster Recovery reviews – A trustworthy data recovery appliance

Thursday, December 18, 2008, 11:39
Technology
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It is a known fact that the IT systems these days are very vulnerable and running an IT infrastructure needs a proper disaster recovery (DR) plan. Most of the DR plans require a mixture of tricky and expensive services like offsite storage, replication, and networking. Plan B, a UK company based in Berkshire, uses an on-site appliance to make daily snapshot backups of servers, which are sent to the company’s data centers via secure internet links. These snapshots are used to create virtualized replicas of servers at the Plan B data centre, and these virtual servers are tested each day to make sure they boot properly without errors. Plan B also creates IPSec VPN links between the client’s office and the Plan B data centre, so that the replacement servers can quickly and easily be reconnected to the company LAN. It can also run extra DNS servers to reroute traffic to the replicas in the event of the main systems going offline.

Plan B claims to replace a client’s server within 30 minutes of the main systems going offline. In a complete disaster scenario where all of a client’s normal IT systems become unavailable, users can connect to the Plan B data centre from any PC or notebook using a web browser and SSL-based VPNs. Then, upon the availability of a suitable replacement office, a connection is re-established to the rescue images using the IPsec VPN. Plan B claims that a three-year contract for 50GB of data will cost a client around $1758 in setup fees plus a service charge of $390 a month. The appliance is compatible with all forms of Windows Server from 2003 onwards.

Plan B disaster recovery appliance takes pride in its simplicity of setup and management. Set up involves fitting the 1U server in client’s data centre rack and connecting it to mains electricity and the LAN. As far as maintenance is concerned, the appliance receives software updates and patches automatically via its connection to the Plan B data centre. With Plan B disaster recovery appliance, IT firms can breathe easy and not worry about data recovery in times of a system failure.