I've been looking for a disk imaging solution for the servers on our network. They currently are all Dell PowerEdge servers running Windows 2003. My main goal is to be able to restore a server quickly in the event of a hardware failure, like a RAID card failure that hoses the hard drives.
We use Arcserve for doing nightly backups and as a file by file solution, it's fine. For disaster recovery, it leaves a lot to be desired. It essentially does a reinstall of the operating system and then restores from back. As such, it's not very fast. I've tried a number of disk imaging software packages. They all can create an image of the server system drive while the server is running and that's great. However, what seems to always be a weak point is restoring from a boot disk. All the packages have a utility to create a bootable CD but they generally have a problem either accessing the RAID volume or the LAN adapter or both. Whether they use Windows PXE, Linux or DOS, drivers seem to be a problem. It would seem logical that these software packages would have a utility to copy the existing drivers off the system and incorporate them into the BootDisk but none do that I've found. The only package I've tried so far that seems to work with the couple of servers I've been testing on is Acronis Backup and Recovery for Servers. I'd use this if it weren't so expensive at roughly $1,000 per server. Anyone using a disk imaging solution they'd care to recommend? Thanks. ---------------------- Bob Hartung Wisco Industries, Inc. 736 Janesville St. Oregon, WI 53575 Tel: (608) 835-3106 x215 Fax: (608) 835-7399 e-mail: bhartung(at)wiscoind.com ~ Finally, powerful endpoint security that ISN'T a resource hog! ~ ~ <http://www.sunbeltsoftware.com/Business/VIPRE-Enterprise/> ~
