(WEB HOST INDUSTRY REVIEW) — On-demand virtual data center services provider SoftLayer (www.softlayer.com) has begun offering EVault Bare Metal Restores, an advanced disaster recovery capability that enables customers to completely restore servers to a bare metal state after an operating system or hardware failure.
According to SoftLayer’s announcement, bare metal restoration is included in SoftLayer’s standard EVault offering and available for Windows-based systems. For $20 per month, EVault BMR provides a wide range of benefits, including the capability to restore systems to a select point-in-time from image or file-based backups, or EVault backups, as well as the ability to launch recovery transactions to restore data without a bootable system.
“Everything we offer is about giving our customers more flexibility, confidence, and control,” SoftLayer IT systems director Andrew Maten said in a statement. “EVault BMR is a powerful, no-nonsense tool for getting systems back up quickly without losing data or functionality.”
The solution provides a more efficient and more reliable alternative to manual restores, and can be used in conjunction with regular backups as well as data migration. System administrators can choose to execute full system restores or restore individual files. As with all SoftLayer services, EVault BMR can be ordered and setup through the SoftLayer Customer Portal.
As more businesses choose outsourced hosting solutions for their data and applications, bare metal restore functionality is becoming an increasingly lucrative add-on for hosting providers to help assure companies their data is safe. In July, web hosting provider Superb Internet (www.superbhosting.net) introduced a new “Managed Dedicated Server” offering featuring R1Soft’s (www.r1soft.com) Continuous Data Protection technology, which offers bare-metal restores from point-in-time snapshots at the sector level up to every 15 minutes.
