Heading Off A Post-Disaster Disaster

Being prepared for a technological disaster is critical, but companies also must consider what they must do after the crisis has passed, when they must get back to business as usual.

Once a day, most companies use tape to back up important data and think the job is done. Unfortunately, after a disaster occurs, other potential problems could add to the nightmare: Not knowing what data needs to be restored; the task of getting crucial data off the storage media, and losing time trying to get things back to normal.

Traditionally, safeguarding data has been both inefficient and expensive for large and small companies alike. Businesses dedicate one-third to one-half of their corporate IT budgets on preventing and recovering from crashes, according to a recent survey from the University of California. In addition, recent figures from market research firm the Gartner Group estimate that 30 to 50 percent of the time, tape backup just does not work.

"Backup has always been the stepchild in the IT department," said Andy Khanna, CEO at Sonasoft. "Meanwhile, the database administrator doesn't want to do the backup because it doesn't challenge the intellect. We want to make sure that if the backup hasn't been done, then the right people are notified."

San Jose, Calif.-based SonaSafe promises a one-click solution to all the problems associated with backup and recovery. "The key differentiators of SonaSafe is that it allows for automated one click rapid recovery of data either to the point of failure or to a point in time without data loss," said Neil Khanna, vice president of operations at Sonasoft. "In addition, the built-in, high-speed compression that we use results in an 80 percent reduction in storage costs related to back-up."The SonaSafe appliance, which is designed for disk-to-disk backup and recovery, picks up the last good backup that was done and then restores it with a single mouse click. The system maintains complete logs of all operations, includes report-generation tools, and creates several levels of e-mail alerts to designated personnel when selected functions have been completed or errors are encountered. "We have removed the manual processes usually involved in disaster recovery," said Andy Khanna. "By automating everything, the user can focus on which database or storage groups need to be backed up or restored without worrying about the underlying technology and how it works."

SonaSafe also lets administrators prioritize the order in which databases should be recovered to allow critical tasks to begin again as quickly as possible. The SonaSafe application is Web-based to access and manage the software, schedule backups and restore data.

Initially, SonaSoft is supporting companies that use Microsoft application software, and has appliances available for Microsoft SQL Server and Exchange Server. The company also plans to release a flat-file product next quarter. The software application must be installed on its own server"the company sells the software and customers then buy their own dedicated server for the software.

The software for SQL Server is priced at $13,000 for 2 to 5 servers. A midrange version is available for $17,995 and supports five to 25 servers, while the high end product, which supports more than 25 servers, costs $25,000.