Publications: Accelerating blade server migration with Symantec Backup Exec System Recovery 8

Because the high density and efficiency of modular blade enclosures can help significantly reduce total cost of ownership compared with stand-alone rack and tower servers, physical consolidation on blade servers is becoming increasingly popular. Designed for the fastest deployment of any Dell server ever produced, the Dell PowerEdge M-Series modular blade enclosure and blades can rapidly integrate into virtually any data center. Integrated into the enclosure is new hardware such as a front interactive LCD that allows administrators to easily configure settings such as IP addresses to help accelerate initial deployment or migration.

To provide a comprehensive deployment and migration solution, Dell also partners with vendors such as Altiris and Symantec on tools such as Altiris Deployment Solution for Dell Servers software and Symantec Backup Exec System Recovery Server Edition. In combination with the PowerEdge M1000e enclosure, these tools offer multiple ways to help simplify the deployment and migration of PowerEdge M-Series blades. By allowing administrators to quickly and easily restore systems to dissimilar hardware, Symantec Backup Exec System Recovery 8 provides a key tool to help organizations accelerate a migration to blade servers.

SYMANTEC BACKUP EXEC SYSTEM RECOVERY 8
Symantec Backup Exec System Recovery 8 provides a comprehensive disk-based, bare-metal system recovery solution for servers, desktops, and notebooks running Microsoft Windows operating systems (including the Windows Server 2008 OS) that enables enterprises to rapidly recover from system loss or disasters—even to dissimilar hardware platforms or virtual environments, or to remote, unattended locations. It is designed to capture a recovery point of the entire live Windows system—including the OS, applications, system settings, configurations, and files— without disrupting end-user productivity or application usage. This recovery point can then be conveniently saved to various media or disk storage devices, includ¬ing storage area networks, network attached storage, direct attach storage, RAID arrays, CDs, and DVDs. When systems fail, administrators can quickly perform a full system restore, even to bare-metal systems, without the need for manual, lengthy, error-prone reinstallations of operating systems, applications, system settings, and preferences.

Backup Exec System Recovery is well suited for both disaster recovery and system migration and is designed to scale to meet growing enterprise needs. As a disaster recovery tool, it enables administrators to recover physical systems to the same hardware or different hardware following partial or complete system loss. As a migration tool, it enables them to accelerate blade server deployments by migrating stand-alone rack and tower servers to blade servers such as the Dell PowerEdge M-Series enclosure and blades.

Backup Exec System Recovery 8 also introduces flexible off-site protection and enhanced recovery capabilities, supporting off-site copying to an FTP site or secondary disk drive as well as simple, seamless conversion of physical systems to virtual environments. Its innovative integration with other Symantec products helps increase the power and flexibility of these tools, offering event-triggered backups based on Symantec ThreatCon security monitoring, central backup management for Altiris Notification Server with the Backup Exec System Recovery Integration Component for Altiris, and features that complement Symantec Backup Exec for Windows Servers.

The powerful Windows recovery capabilities in Backup Exec System Recovery can also auto-detect hardware and load the appropriate drivers to boot the system, helping eliminate the need to manually build recovery floppy disks, and its intelligent USB drive identification enables it to run backup jobs to a given USB device even if the drive letter changes. The customizable Symantec Recovery Disk can automatically harvest system drivers not already included on the disk and allow administrators to add drivers for a customized recovery environment tailored to meet their specific hardware needs.

Three features of Backup Exec System Recovery provide key additional functionality to enable flexible system recovery, rapid object recovery, and scalable centralized management and help simplify both data recovery and blade server migration: the Symantec Restore Anyware technology included with Backup Exec System Recovery, and the Granular Restore Option and Backup Exec System Recovery Manager available as separate add-ons.

Flexible system recovery: Restore Anyware
The Symantec Restore Anyware technology in Symantec Backup Exec System Recovery allows administrators to quickly and easily recover systems to dissimilar hardware or virtual Windows environments, helping dramatically reduce recovery times and save on hardware investments. These hardware-independent restore capabilities provide high levels of flexibility to restore systems virtually anytime, from virtually anywhere, to virtually any device within their existing IT infrastructure.

By combining hot imaging with the ability to recover systems to different hardware platforms, Restore Anyware helps overcome the barriers of incompatible storage controllers and hardware abstraction layers. Its integrated network interface card (NIC) support helps ensure that NICs function properly after a recovery point has been restored to a dissimilar system. In addition, Restore Anyware enables end users to migrate their system to new hardware without requiring a new installation—a key capability when upgrading hardware or repurposing systems for a different role.

Rapid object recovery: Granular Restore Option
The Symantec Backup Exec System Recovery Granular Restore Option enables administrators to rapidly restore individual objects from recovery points for Microsoft Exchange servers (including Exchange Server 2007 servers), Microsoft Office SharePoinf servers, and file servers. The integrated multi-tab interface provides convenient access to recovery points and allows administrators to search multiple recovery points simultaneously . The Granular Restore Option also helps avoid the need for Exchange mailbox backups, allowing administrators to rapidly recover critical Exchange mailboxes, folders, messages, and attachments and even forward them directly through the Microsoft Office Outlook" e-mail client.

Scalable centralized management: Backup Exec System Recovery Manager
Symantec Backup Exec System Recovery Manager allows administrators to manage multiple Backup Exec System Recovery installations from a centralized console, where they can monitor the current protection status of their managed systems from a simplified, consolidated home page view. Administrators can use this console to detect issues for quick problem analysis and view historical trends.

Administrators can use Backup Exec System Recovery Manager to view the real-time status of backup jobs; filter these jobs by computer name, job type, job name, and IP address; and examine errors to troubleshoot problems. They can also define recovery point policies for groups of servers, desktops, or notebooks with similar requirements; drag and drop to deploy those policies; and generate predefined reports in comma-separated values (CSV), HTML, XML, and Microsoft Office Excel spreadsheet formats for distribution to IT management. Backup Exec System Recovery Manager supports role-based levels of management as needed.

ACCELERATED BLADE SERVER MIGRATION
Symantec Backup Exec System Recovery Server Edition—with its Restore Anyware feature—allows administrators to quickly and easily create complete system images of traditional rack and tower servers and deploy them on blade servers with dissimilar hardware. The disk-to-disk technology used in Backup Exec System Recovery can also help administrators meet ambitious system migration time objectives.

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