Plan B Disaster RecoveryDisaster Recovery Service

Frequently Asked Questions

Business Continuity

Virtualisation Technology

The Plan B DR Service

Business Continuity

Why is an IT Disaster Recovery provision important?

Simply because IT systems are so important to most businesses and the potential to lose the use of any individual system or systems is probably a lot higher than you think. Threats come not only from biblical disasters but more commonly from things like hardware or software failure, human error, deliberate damage, hackers, viruses etc. The important question to ask is how long could you survive without your systems and what would be the business and reputational damage of a prolonged outage?
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What is the difference between Disaster Recovery and back-up?

Data back-ups help you if you have lost or deleted individual files or groups of files or data from an essentially working system. A disaster recovery provision will get you back an entire machine, including hardware, operating system and application software, and of course data, whatever has befallen the original system.
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Do I need IT Disaster Recovery if I already have backups?

It depends how long you can do without your computer systems. If you only have data back-ups and you lose your computer systems irrevocably, you will have to buy new systems, replace the system and application software before reloading all your data from scratch. This process can take a very long time (2 to 7 days is not uncommon) even if you know exactly what you need to do and everything works as planned, first time. If you think your business needs it’s systems faster than that then you will need to invest in a Disaster Recovery provision such as Plan B’s service, that will enable you to recover a whole working machine in an agreed timescale. In Plan B’s case that could be as little as 30 minutes.
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What are the advantages of local backup with the DR service?

The Plan B DR service provides not only a fast, effective, affordable way of recovering whole systems in the event of a disaster, but within the same system and budget, it also provides a fast, simple way of recovering data when the system is fine but an individual file or set of files is lost.
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What do RTO and RPO mean?

RTO means Recovery Time Objective. It is essentially the maximum amount of time a business can afford to elapse before recovery is achieved.

RPO means Recovery Point Objective. It is essentially the state or point a business believes it needs to recover to in order to carry on business in the event of an incident that threatens its continuity.

In relation to IT disaster recovery, the RPO should define what systems are critical to recover and what state they should be in, and the RTO defines how quickly those systems need to be available for the business to survive. These two terms will therefore define what sort of disaster recovery provision a business needs.

The Plan B DR service will deliver an RPO for an individual computer of a fully working system, with data up to 24 hours old, accessible over a secure Internet connection. It will deliver an RTO for the systems themselves of 30 minutes.
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Why use a managed service for your IT DR?

The managed nature of the Plan B DR service means that whatever your business’s other commitments or priorities, you can be confident that its IT systems are protected. Your Rescue Systems will be updated, tested and stored every day, ready to be swung into action as and when you need them; no distractions, no conflicts. Having a managed service also means that you wont have to start worrying about recovering systems yourselves in the middle of a crisis. Plan B DR staff will be dedicated to calmly getting your systems back leaving you to concentrate on your business, staff and customers.
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What is the Plan B DR service?

Plan B DR offer a fully managed disaster recovery service that is tested every day, and can give you back your working systems in 30 minutes. Its quickly and easily setup, includes a local file back-up feature, and costs about the same as a couple of good lunches per month. See the Recovery Service section for more details.
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What are the advantages to using the Plan B DR Service?

Plan B DR offer a complete managed service that delivers you working systems, not a bag of bits and tools that you would have to try to make work in the event of a disaster. It is very simple to set up and needs no ongoing support. It will give you back fully working systems over a secure Internet connection in around 30 minutes, and is proven to work every day though testing, so you can be confident it will work when you need it. Finally it is a very effective, and with monthly prices from £199, a very affordable way of protecting your business’s critical systems.
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So what is so different about the Plan B DR service?

Firstly, our whole service is about giving you back working systems, not the bits to enable you to rebuild systems. As such we go to great lengths to make sure that the service does what we say. In particular we test every rescue image we hold for a customer at least every day. If it fails for any reason we fix it. Secondly, we use virtualisation technology innovatively, which means that no customer has to have their own dedicated hardware, software or support letting us deliver a remarkably high recovery point service for a fraction of the cost of traditional approaches. Finally, we have exploited our snapshotting process to include a local file back-up feature that may well mean that you can dispense with your existing back up system.

If all that is not enough we offer a completely free 30 day trial.
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Virtualisation Technology

What is virtualisation?

Virtualisation is a set of technologies that allow multiple computer systems to be run on a single piece of hardware, with every system effectively thinking that it’s running on a complete machine.
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What is the advantage of a service based on virtualisation?

It useful for a whole bunch of reasons. Fundamentally, though, it allows us to run a large architecture, which can be sliced and diced as we need it to provide service on demand. It also allows our service to be very highly automated, and allows us to respond very rapidly to changing resource requirements.
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Will my systems run the same way in a Virtual Machine?

In nearly every case, yes. Systems that attachment to specific hardware (GSM Modems, USB Security Dongles, etc) may need special attention, but for a normal server, it will run just fine.
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Do I have to change my systems in any way to make them run on Plan B’s virtualised system?

No. You continue to run your own systems exactly as before. When Plan B DR update our rescue copy of your images, we make all the necessary changes to ensure they run properly.
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How can I be sure that my system will work on the Plan B DR virtualised system in the event of a disaster?

Every time we update your rescue image, the systems are tested to ensure that they work. The images are updated every time new data is received, so this is carried out daily for the vast majority of the systems that we protect.
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Aren’t there lots of other IT DR services based on virtualisation?

Virtualisation is certainly the buzzword of the moment, and because it offers some significant advantages for disaster recovery there are a few products have been launched onto the market recently that use virtualisation in one form or another. However, all the other offerings that use virtualisation effectively are all products which a customer must buy and use to produce their own disaster recovery provision, and are therefore the customers responsibility to make work in the event of a disaster. There are also a few which simply use virtualisation to provide a quick and easy way of provisioning a new machine, but with no effort made to have working images of systems in advance of a disaster. With these types of solutions all the hard work starts while you are in the middle of a crisis.

The Plan B DR service uses virtualisation to simplify, automate and radically change the cost structure of a disaster recovery provision. Ours is a fully managed service that needs no customer intervention or changes to their running systems and that delivers tested, working systems to customers quickly and calmly in the event of a disaster.
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The Plan B DR Service

What server operating systems are supported?

We support all commonly used versions of Windows Server from 2003 onwards and have almost all versions including the very latest running as live customer services on our Rescue platform. We don’t support older Windows 2000 systems.

Sadly we also don’t support Linux systems because there is no way we have currently found to take a single state snapshot for even the most popular flavours.
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What applications are supported?

We support most of the Microsoft product set, most commonly used databases and most standard business applications. We would expect to support any application that falls outside this so long as it doesn’t have any peculiarity that specifically precludes it from working when it is moved between environments. These are rare and are typically licensing or other security measures that tightly tie an application to one bit of hardware. Even then there may be ways we can make this work in the event of a disaster but we couldn’t test this as part of the daily testing regimes.
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How are copies of my servers collected?

Plan B DR Provide a Snapshotting appliance, which sits in your network, next to the servers that we protect. A small snapshot agent is installed on each protected host, and these handle the offloading of data to the appliance.
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What is the Plan B DR Snapshotting Appliance and what does it do?

The Snapshotting appliance takes care of scheduling snapshots, and making sure that data is sent back to Plan B’s Rescue Platforms. It also does a number of routine housekeeping roles, and copies of previous data, in case it’s needed.
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How does the local backup work?

The Plan B DR appliances have a good amount of storage on board. They hold a complete copy of all the data that’s associated with the machines we protect, and as many sets of historic data as they can accommodate. Because they store changes to data, this can mean that a single appliance can hold many, many days worth of historical data. The appliance provides an Administration Portal that allows authorised users to request a restore of historical data back to the machines it came from, or to other protected machines.
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How easy is the service to set up?

The service is designed to be a very quick and easy thing to deploy. There is a short questionnaire to fill in, which defines the servers that Plan B DR will protect, an appliance to install on your network (a very simple process, typically taking only 10 minutes or so), and backup agents to install on every machine that is to be protected. And that’s it!
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How often does the Appliance take copies of my systems?

Generally speaking, we expect to take a daily copy, usually overnight. The schedules for this can be adjusted, and it may be possible to take more than one a day, although this will vary depending on your individual requirements.
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What happens if the appliance fails?

Plan B DR will simply ship you a new one. Installation of this appliance is as simple as the original installation, and the new appliance will acquire all it’s configuration data back from the Plan B DR Rescue Silos, so it will take over from where the old one left off. The Plan B DR Rescue Silos hang on to your last known good snapshot in the meantime, too, so you still won’t be completely unprotected while the appliance is replaced.
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Won’t the shipping of snapshots be heavy on my bandwidth?

We only transfer data that has changed between one snapshot and the next. The first one is generally pretty big, but subsequent updates take a whole lot less space. Transfers are compressed and encrypted, and we’re pretty good at making sure we don’t send duplicate data.
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What has to be done to a snapshot to make it work on the virtualised platform?

Deep Voodoo. We apply a number of ‘overlays’ to the snapshots in order to make them function smoothly in their new environment. This includes everything from installing storage and network drivers, supporting software for the Virtualisation environment, network configurations, test agents, disabling hardware-specific monitoring agnets, and application-specific changes to make them work in their new environment. This is all done automatically, every single day, and doesn’t need any involvement from the customer at all.
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How do I know that the Rescue Image of my server will run in the event of a disaster?

Every Rescue image is tested every time it’s updated. This testing is pretty thorough, and is used to establish that your entire set of protected systems can be started up, can correctly interact with each other, and that they can be used to do useful work. In the event of a disaster, we’d simply repeat that process, and we already know it worked less than 24 hours ago!
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What happens if a Rescue Image fails to run?

If a Rescue Image fails its testing, then it is marked as failed, and a ticket is raised. The causes of the failures will be investigated, and resolved. More importantly, Plan B DR always retain a ‘last known good’ image, which can be pressed into service should a disaster befall you at the worst possible time. So even if last night’s test failed, and your systems failed immediately afterwards, we’d still have night before’s available.
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In what circumstances can I invoke a recovery of my systems?

Plan B DR think that a Disaster is a Disaster if YOU think it is. We don’t impose any limitations on the circumstances under which you are ‘allowed’ it invoke a recovery, so we’re happy to assist you even under circumstances where you’d usually be caught in a providers small-print.
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Can I really recover my critical systems within 30 minutes in the event of a disaster?

Generally, we will have your systems running on the Rescue Platform in 15 to 30 minutes. If DNS and Email handling are required, then this may take a little longer, but if they’re inside our control, then we’d expect systems running within the hour.
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What actually happens when I invoke a recovery?

We go through a security process to establish that the request for recovery is genuine. Once you have established your identity, then we activate the recovery process. This is entirely automated, and boots up all your protected systems (in order). At the same time, it adjusts DNS and Email Relay records, and dynamically reconfigures firewall and VPN settings to allow access to your systems. Once this process is complete, we contact you again, providing you with access details to your systems.
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Will recovered systems be the same as my original systems?

Essentially, yes. They will be running your software, with your login credentials. We provide you with VPN connectivity to get to them, and you can administer them as you did in the live environment.
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How will my staff access the recovered systems?

As part of the initial service setup, we will go through the access mechanisms with you. The precise option that fits best varies by customer, but a ‘typical’ customer will have IPSEC Site-to-Site VPN Access to the platform from one or more locations, as well as SSL VPN access for Roaming Users. The IPSEC VPNs are configured as the service is set up, and the SSL VPNs can easily be deployed as required in a disaster.
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Who runs my servers in recovery?

You do. Plan B DR Employees don’t even know any of your login details. You can look after the systems as you did before you were in recovery.
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How do I migrate back to my live systems after the disaster has been dealt with?

This largely depends on what you want to migrate back to. If you already run a virtual infrastructure, then it could be as simple as us shipping you complete disk images, ready to run with your data on them. Other scenarios run more like a traditional migration, with replacement hardware being provisioned and set up, and us shipping the data to you.
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