Good points . Obscenely easy way to rebuild a corrupted server .
Disadvantages:
Bad points . Limited hardware and software support . Make sure your operating system can read all partitions .
Recommend to potential buyers:
yes
Full review
Those of us who have had to spend a late Friday afternoon rebuilding a really important server, longing to get to the pub, will no doubt be yearning for something where we can just press one button and get the machine back up and running and doing all the things it was supposed to do before it went base over apex.
Until recently disaster recovery has been a lengthy, time-consuming process of locating operating system (OS) disks, application disks, backup tapes, and configuration details.
The new Hewlett Packard SureStore DAT40e could be an answer to those prayers, for its much-touted industry first, one-button disaster recovery (OBDR), a clever system which fools your server into thinking the tape back up drive is really a bootable CD-ROM drive.
Booting from a tape drive is not new. In fact, most dedicated UNIX workstations are able to do this, as can big transaction processing systems. Until now, however, it has been almost impossible for a standard PC to do so. There has never been BIOS support for sequential devices such as tape drives, and they can only function once drivers have been loaded later in the boot process. Consequently, the necessary, minimal disaster recovery operating system cannot be loaded and the restoration process cannot start.
Installation of the tape drive and software is as easy as anything on NT can get. Yosemite TapeWare is provided in the box and proved to be a usable piece of back up software. The tape drive is a SCSI device we connected to an Adaptec 2940 SCSI card; it is also provided with a Multi-mode SCSI terminator block as well. This terminator detects whether the host bus adapter is SE or LVD and automatically provides the appropriate termination.
HP TapeAssure is provided on disk to check your SCSI configuration in Windows as well as other back up software, utilities and drivers. The same tape drive can be used for Unix and NetWare systems.
Once that is done it is a mere snip to make a complete back up of all files on your server and create a disaster recovery “CD-ROM” on your back up tape. The SureStore DAT40 works best the tape standard DDS-4; the tape can store up to 40 GB of data from multiple disks and RAID arrays. And is fully backward compatible with DDS-2 and DDS-3. However, don’t bother using your old DDS-1 tapes, they won’t be written to on this machine.
HP recommends that you test your server for compatibility before instituting any disaster recovery policy based on this hardware. Again this was just a case of rebooting the server and tape drive whilst pressing down the eject button on the tape drive. Our test server which is not mentioned in any hardware compatibility lists from HP passed this test with flying colours when it detected the tape drive as a bootable “CD-ROM”. According to the user guide only certain models of HP, Dell, IBM, Compaq and Acer hardware support OBDR.
In order to test out how well this hardware would work we deliberately trashed our test server and then when we failed to boot up our server we rebooted again, this time using the “one-button” method and allowed the tape drive to get to work.
At this point we have to admit that this didn’t work first time but this was down to reviewer error in not making sure that the server tried to boot from SCSI devices in the BIOS set up. Once this was rectified we went through the whole process again.
This time we watched as the tape drive whirled into action and completely rebuilt our poor server. Once switched into OBDR mode, the tape drive checks for a disaster recovery header. If the tape drive detects a non-disaster recovery tape, it is ejected. When it detects a disaster recovery tape cartridge, it proceeds to read the special disaster recovery CD-ROM image block and the computer boots from this code.
And after the disaster recovery software asked a few simple questions and made completely sure that we knew what we were about to do, it set about re-installing back up files effor tlessly and without any further interaction from us.
It finished off its task and rebooted the machine again. It was as if the server never had a problem in the first place. A quick visual check in explorer revealed no missing files in our system partition; in fact it even restored all files that were in the temporary folder during the initial back up.
Using an OBDR tape drive such as HP DDS-4 the total disk (18 GB) could be backed up in less than 1 hour, or more typically, with 3 GB of storage used, this could be backed up or restored in approximately 15 minutes.
The only negative in this test came about when we looked at our FAT32 partition. As we were running NT4, the FAT32 partition couldn’t be read so couldn’t be backed up. Our disaster recovery despite all attempts to stop it from touching this partition went ahead and reformatted it, losing what could have been important data. To be fair this is more of an OS issue.
The beauty of this system is that whenever you installed new software or reconfigure anything, a quick backup will make sure that should the worst happen this quick system provides for a simple and cost-effective way to get your machines back online and with the minimum amount of fuss. With the floppy and CD methods of disaster recovery, each time the system configuration changes, the administrator must remember to update the disaster recovery image on the floppy disks or burn another CD. With a bit of lateral thinking it could even be used to install ghost images on standardised machines.
More details
Design
Satisfactory
Ease of use
Very easy
Instruction manual
Satisfactory
Manufacturer Support
Good
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