Preparing for site-wide failures such as floods, earthquakes and fire is critical for maintaining business continuity – both at the main data center and at alternate or remote sites. Your data is a vital asset and Backup Express helps you keep it safe and available, not matter what the conditions.

The Backup Express DR solution allows you to facilitate a repeatable, dependable, tested scenario to recover business sites within your recovery time objective in the event of a site-level disaster. Backup Express includes the ability to recover data, applications and operating systems through bare metal restore and even utilize applications remotely with the Instant Availability feature.

The Backup Express DR solution provides an end-to-end enterprise-wide strategy that:

1. Maximises and simplifies continuity of business (COB) in the event of server failure or catastrophic site failure.
2. Optimises data integrity and consistency through frequent backups and recoveries to past points in time.
3. Provides powerful and effective tools for maintenance and activation of disaster recovery (DR) sites.
4. Maintains scalability while meeting continuity of operations planning requirements for enterprises of all sizes.
5. Simultaneously supports routine backup and restore obligations.

Disasters are unpredictable. Redundancy of backed up snapshots is imperative. By replicating to a tertiary disk at your company's DR site, you prepare for a possible outage.

Redundancy is embedded in the Backup Express solution strategy. After each locally scheduled node backup at the initial site, a data transfer from the secondary system (original disk backup destination) across a WAN to an alternate secondary system at the DR site is recommended. Only the changed blocks are transferred. The content of the alternate secondary remains identical to the content at the main site.

Backup to tape can also be performed for added protection. Backup Express NDMP backup jobs can be used to back up secondary volumes to removable media.

Backup Express integrates all aspects of a complete DR solution.

Features	Benefits
Rapid business recovery	Both operating systems and applications are available via alternate secondary disk-based images
Application integration	Ensures protection and rapid recovery of database and messaging business applications
Replicated point-in-time volumes	Keeps all backed up point-in-time volumes at alternate site for corruption protection, development or testing
Centralized management	Administration can be managed by HQ staff for all sites
Block-level data transfer	Only changed blocks are transferred

Backup Express also provides the following disaster recovery features:

• Twinning. This option gives you the ability to make two tape copies instead of one during any backup procedure, saving you the time otherwise needed for an additional disaster recovery backup.
• Tape Duplication. This feature enables duplication of tapes after backups are executed. One tape can then be kept onsite and the other sent offsite.
• Catalog Backup. Backups of the Backup Express catalog itself can be scheduled nightly to minimize downtime. Execute a simple restore of the latest catalog and you're ready to recover the entire enterprise. No need to rebuild the database by scanning in hundreds of tapes; Backup Express provides a simple, fast procedure to put your business back on track.
• Extensive Media Reports. Our powerful custom reporting facility allows you to track the status and location of all onsite and offsite tapes. Backup Express Reporter provides detailed and summary media tracking reports, allowing an administrator to easily develop a rotation scheme to send and return tapes to offsite locations.
• Tape Scan. Because Backup Express data is written to tape using the SIDF (System Independent Data Format), you can recover data from tape without the Backup Express catalog. This provides ultimate protection -- guaranteeing that data can always be restored.