Dell DL 2100 User Manual

INTELLIGENT
DISASTER
RECOVERY

DELL POWERVAULT DL 2100
POWERED BY SYMANTEC

Intelligent Disaster Recovery

The PowerVault DL2100– Powered by Symantec Backup Exec offers the industry’s only fully inte­grated backup-to-disk solution with software factory installed. Dell and Symantec have co­developed this offering to give you easier management capabilities of the backup-to-disk environ­ment. It’s an ideal way for any IT department to achieve faster, more reliable backups and re­stores. In addition, the appliance includes system level disaster recovery capabilities designed to
recover failed systems no matter the cause.

When a network server fails due to human error, a hardware failure, or a major disaster, the sys­tem must be carefully recovered before the applications and backed-up data can be restored.
Disaster recovery technology strategically complements backup and restore technology.
Whereas, the primary purpose of backup and restore is to restore applications and data, the pri­mary purpose of disaster recovery is to restore the computing environment itself. Backup and
restore assumes that a computing environment exists that will support data recovery. Disaster
recovery ensures that the environment is available and minimizes the amount of time required to
bring network systems back to full functionality.
Before the development of automated disaster recovery technology, manual disaster recovery
had been labor intensive, vulnerable to human error, a lengthy process, and costly in terms of loss
of both productivity and revenue. Moreover, manual disaster recovery often fails because of a lack
of preparation, poorly documented configuration data, and lack of a formal process to complete
the task. In today’s environments, changes in the operating system increase the need for a uni­form, automated process to secure the operating environment and recovery of business critical
data.

The PowerVault DL Backup to Disk Appliance features disaster recovery capabilities powered by
Symantec Backup Exec Intelligent Disaster Recovery Option. The Intelligent Disaster Recovery
Option eliminates the need to manually re-install the entire operating system after a system crash.
Using the created bootable media, the Intelligent Disaster Recovery Option allows an administra­tor to bring a Windows-based system back online fast by restoring data from the last complete
backup set including full, differential, incremental, working set, and modified file backups.

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Intelligent Disaster Recovery

The Intelligent Disaster Recovery Option saves recovery time by automating the traditional
manual, error prone process. This option automates server recovery, reducing the time to recover
and gets business back into production fast.

Using either a CD-R/CD-RW or bootable tape, the Intelligent Disaster Recovery Option will quickly
recover downed servers enabling restores from the last complete backup set including full,
differential, incremental, and working set backups.

How Intelligent Disaster Recovery Works

The Intelligent Disaster Recovery Option is designed to protect Microsoft Windows operating
systems. There are unique challenges in protecting these environments that are discussed in the
section, “Intelligent Disaster Recovery for Different Platforms and Windows Operating Systems”.
The Intelligent Disaster Recovery Configuration Wizard appears the first time Backup Exec is
launched from the Dell Appliance Management Console. The wizard systematically guides a user
through the steps necessary in preparing for a disaster recovery and in recovering a local or
remote Windows system to its pre-disaster state. A complete Intelligent Disaster Recovery
Operation consists of the following 3 steps:

1. Creating a Disaster Recovery file that contains specific information about the
protected computer.

2. Making a full backup of the system being protected.

3. Creating bootable Disaster Recovery media for the protected system.

Step 1: Creating a Disaster Recovery File

The Disaster Recovery File contains specific information about the individual system that is being
protected. This information includes:

• Hardware specific information for each system including hard disk partition

information, mass storage controller information, and Network Interface Card
information.

• The list of catalog entries that identify the backup media and sets needed to recover

the system in the event of a disaster.

• Windows Automated System Restore (ASR) configuration for Windows XP and

Windows Server 2003 systems.

1. On the Backup Exec Getting Started screen, select “Configure Intelligent Disaster Recovery”
to start the wizard. When the Welcome screen appears, click “Next” to continue.

Backup Exec automatically creates a *.dr file for the IDR-protected computer when it is backed up
and stores it in the default location on the media server’s hard drive, which is:

C:\Program Files\Symantec\Backup Exec\idr\Data\<computer name>.dr.

The “Enter an Alternate Data Path” screen allows you to specify an alternate location for storing a
copy of the *.dr. This allows the *.dr file to be available even if the media server has been
damaged.

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