RSPB goes for virtualised backup

gallery

The Royal Society for the Protection of Birds (RSPB), Europe's largest conservation charity, has deployed a virtualised disaster recovery strategy within its organisation.

The charity is using VMware ESX Server and software from backup software developer Vizioncore to take point-in-time backups of live-running virtual machines, including key conservation applications and databases.

These applications are then backed up to a central library at a secondary site from which they can be restored for disaster recovery or testing and development.

Mike Courtney, Senior Systems Engineer at RSPB, said that using the software meant that the charity has been able to automate much of its virtual machine backup process and can also take ad-hoc backups prior to performing any major work on a server. The backup can be either a full one or just a differential backup and the image can either be stored locally in a San or sent as a compressed file over the charity's Wan to a remote location to support disaster recovery strategies.

"In the event we have any problems during maintenance work we can simply restore any affected server to its original state using the virtual machine image," said Courtney.

He said the major benefit of the implementation was that it made backing up a simple process and required no downtime from servers.

"It also reduces the time and complexity associated with testing and development as we are able to roll out backups of production servers into our testing environment with very little trouble," he said.

Email to a friend

Print this page