“One certainty in IT is that there will be problems which you
need to recover from–fast.“Servers crash. Hard drives die. Users delete files they want
back. OS patches don’t work. It’s possible to recover … if you’ve
got the right files, the right spare hardware, enough time, and
enough knowledge. Sometimes it may be a quick simple fix. But in
the extreme case, what’s needed is a full ‘Bare Metal Restore,’
meaning ‘to a machine with a cherry hard drive that may not even be
formatted and partitioned.’“Of course, doing a re-install and rebuild can take time–hours,
even days, if you have to start by retrieving full and incremental
backup tapes–which may be off-site–and finding and configuring
hardware.“Meanwhile, while you’re working to get things back together,
there’s a lot of angry yelling and screaming, because in today’s
7x24x365 e-world, even one hour of downtime is a lot. This is being
called ‘Business Systems Continuity.’ Hence the need for what’s
being called ‘rapid recovery…'”