The Seven Deadly Sins of Backup and Recovery
The Hero-Defender from HEROware is an all-in-one solution designed for data protection and data recovery for servers. Unlike traditional data backup solutions, Hero-Defender offers real-time data protection to multiple servers, as well as automatic failover for continuous operation even in the face of an unexpected hardware outage.
According to HEROware, Hero-Defender offers four layers of protection. This starts with real-time replication at the byte level, in which data changes are captured directly from the production server to ensure that backed-up data is always up to date. The solution also supports standard full image backups for point-in-time recovery, while VSS snapshots mean that specific files and folders that may have been corrupted can be quickly located and restored.
Finally, SMBs looking for a hybrid-cloud solution have a SAS-70-compliant, secure-cloud option for businesses that demand off-site or geographical protection. More application-specific or granular support is also optionally available for application servers such as Exchange, SQL Server or SharePoint.
In trying to understand the product, what caught my attention was its automatic failover capability, which offers high availability reliability without the high costs and complexity inherent to such deployments. When a server fails, for example, Hero-Defender will automatically start a virtual machine with the latest data. Importantly, the company says that such failovers can be tested at any time “with one click” so that organizations can check on the integrity of replicated data.
In the past, businesses looking to protect against hardware failures either had to purchase a spare server or enter into expensive support agreements for same-day replacement of a server. On this front, Hero-Defender offers bare metal recovery either to the same type of system, or even on dissimilar hardware or virtual environments. It is certainly nice to have it integrated with ones’ data backup solution.
Under the hood, the Hero-Defender solution utilizes well-established Double-Take data protection software from Vision Solutions, and runs on Dell hardware and the Microsoft server operating system. Ultimately, the overall system integration and Web interface offers often-understaffed IT departments of SMBs a robust and supported solution that just works.
One final benefit going for Hero-Defender is its lack of licensing ambiguity that may arise from a self-deployed solution containing technologies from a number of different vendors. HEROware says the Hero-Defender is available as a one-time purchase or on a monthly subscription plan.
