Vault Session

Transcript

2. Paul Rouse President & Owner, Rouse Consulting Group Jeff Neumann Product Director, Backup Solutions, Continuum Best Practices for Deploying BDR
3. Rouse Consulting Best Practices
4. A little background on us ¤  Approx Company size ¤  Client base (size, locations) ¤  Industries served ¤  Current Growth ¤  Recent acquisition and other news to share
5. Preparing for deployment ¤  Review disk space usage and properly size your Appliance ¤  We use a 5x used disk space rule ¤  Review client environment ¤  Evaluate switch, networking cables, and UPS power ¤  We replace/upgrade as necessary to ensure the environment can properly support backups ¤  Perform health checks on protected machines ¤  Run check disk and defrag ¤  Remove ALL traces of existing backup agents ¤  Apply all MS patches and VSS updates ¤  Install the Vault agents on protected machines and reboot the servers ¤  Perform the initial appliance configuration
6. Backup and Retention Schedules ¤  Setting backup schedules ¤  We configure backups to happen once an hour during business hours ¤  Another backup at 11pm ¤  Setting Retention schedules ¤  Intra-daily into dailies: 2 days ¤  Dailies into weekly: 2 weeks ¤  Weeklies to Monthly: 3 months ¤  We’ve found that this is an ideal configuration for our clients to ensure we can meet their RTO and RPO expectations
7. Offsite synchronization ¤  We replicate backups once a day using the 11pm backup ¤  Configure offsite retention to: ¤  Intra-daily to dailies: never ¤  Dailies to weekly: 2 weeks ¤  Weeklies to monthly: 3 months ¤  We lead with Server Vault Pro with unlimited storage so we do not have to worry about offsite storage
8. Monitoring the health of backups ¤  My techs live in the ITSupport Portal ¤  They love the single pane of glass to easily manage all aspects of the BDR ¤  We use Screenshot verifications to ensure our backups are running smoothly ¤  Screenshots are set to occur every 24 hours ¤  Set a delay of 20 minutes to ensure the vm will boot ¤  Custom notification threshold of 25 hours
9. Disaster Recovery preparation and testing ¤  Know your clients configuration ¤  Keep an updated run book ¤  DR tests help you (and your client) know what to do when a disaster strikes ¤  We do xxxxxx to ensure we are prepared for a DR ¤  Real world examples of DR’s that have happened to us
10. Best Practices from Continuum
11. What we’ve seen with Vault ¤  Preparation is key to successful backups ¤  Upfront work greatly reduces issues down the road ¤  We have tech advantage projects to help with prep work ¤  Make sure the client network is up to par to handle backup streams ¤  Size an appliance on storage AND resource needs ¤  Consider VM requirements when selecting RAM ¤  A single NIC can only allow so much data to flow ¤  Backup and retention schedules – choose wisely ¤  The more you keep, the more storage you need. Planning ahead of time will keep your device from maxing out
12. What we’ve seen with Vault ¤  We bundle RMM with every Vault agent. Use it to make your lives easier ¤  Patches, A/V, LogMeIn, and the NOC greatly reduce ongoing maintenance ¤  Ensure your NOC access levels and reboot schedules are setup for your site ¤  Use Lights out management to avoid having to go onsite for appliance problems ¤  Bandwidth schedules are your friend ¤  We give you tools to reduce network congestion at your client site. Don’t forget to set this! ¤  Changing concurrent offsite sync can help if an agent gets out of date ¤  Vault appliances should have static IP addresses
13. What we’ve seen with Vault ¤  Use Revive only with supported configurations. These are published in our online doc center. ¤  Perform a DR test once a year ¤  Keep the offsite virtualization form on hand and up to date ¤  Test your processes (and include your client) to reduce uncertainty in a DR situation ¤  Let the NOC be your force multiplier. We have a dedicated team that just handles the Vault and backup issues ¤  No other company has the technical knowledge and depth that our NOC has
14. In Summary ¤  Preparation is essential. The upfront investment will pay dividends over time. ¤  Know your client and their needs. Be their Virtual CIO to ensure their systems are protected at all times. ¤  Plan, plan, and plan some more. Perform a DR test to remove the unknowns. ¤  Reduce the time your techs spend managing backups by leveraging the NOC. ¤  BDR can be a fantastic revenue stream. Following best practices will reduce costs and maximize your profits!
15. Q&A