Altiris recovery solution extends to servers

The recent spate of virus and worm attacks left hundreds of thousands of servers around the world severely crippled - and many took days to recover.

However, had these organisations had the latest recovery and backup solution from Altiris installed, they could have cut their recovery period significantly, says John Thomas, Altiris General Manager at independent IT solutions provider, First Technology which represents Altiris in SA.

Altiris - the leader in systems management solutions that reduce the total cost of owning IT - has long built up a global reputation for the recovery and backup of desktop PCs. Altiris Recovery Solution 5.7 now extends this unmatched problem resolution capability to servers.

"The negative impact of the MSBlaster, Sobig F and Welchia worms on business performance has made it imperative for companies to be able to ensure the recovery of every device in the organisation," Thomas says.

"Some of SA`s largest companies were hit during September and the cost to the country - and their own organisation - ran into millions of rands. In fact, the Sunday Times (31 August) reported that several top companies which have sophisticated firewalls and anti-virus software installed, were on the receiving end of the worms` venom.

"One was hit by all three of the viruses and had to call in international computer experts to limit damage to its computer systems. Another company reportedly had 3 500 workstations out of action - resulting in a loss of an estimated R500 000 with the manual clean-up processing taking two days."

Altiris Recovery Solution 5.7 protects an organisation`s desktops, notebooks and servers with scheduled backups, providing lost data recovery or system rollback to a known good state. It also protects operating systems, applications and data from unintended changes, accidental deletions, hardware failure and catastrophic loss from virus corruption, loss or theft.

In addition, Recovery Solution provides open and locked file support including optional backup to a protected area on the local hard drive, and additional efficiencies for the mobile and remote user.

"Altiris Recovery Solution also addresses the growing threat to business continuity caused by a lack of end-user data backup and allows us to offer a fuller set of management solutions that have an even greater return on investment."

Automated protection from Recovery Solution runs in the background to ensure data is continually protected.

Thomas says that, in the past, businesses have had to spend significant amounts of capital recovering from disk failures and human error. "Our typical end-user has gigabytes of unique data that is not easily replaced. Recovery Solution will pay for itself after recovering the first set of lost data.

"If an end-user ever needs a single lost file, IT can always restore it - or it can be obtained with a few clicks of the mouse in Windows Explorer. This saves incredible amounts of time in problem resolution, while the benefits of business continuity for the end-user are almost immeasurable.

"In addition, Altiris` patented technology minimises bandwidth usage and time needed for incremental backups. This is done by storing common files once across an entire organisation, and efficiently storing and managing deltas since the last backup," Thomas concludes.