Disaster Recovery Support and Service for

Altaro VM Backup Solutions: Hyper-V and VMware Virtual Server Backup
Altaro VM Backup is designed to provide small and mid-size businesses with a reliable and affordable solution for backing up and restoring Hyper-V and VMware-based virtual machines (VMs). Altaro VM Backup can be used for local, offsite, multi-site, and cloud-based environments and also supports cost-effective cloud backup to a Microsoft Azure Block Blob storage account. Top features include industry-leading Augmented Inline Deduplication to reduce backup storage requirements, Continuous Data Protection (CDP) with backup intervals as low as five minutes for reducing your exposure to data loss, military-grade encryption, granular restore options for entire virtual machines or for individual files and emails, extensive support for Windows Server Cluster Shared Volumes (CSV) and VMware vCenter, and the ability to leverage Microsoft Volume Shadow Copy Service (VSS) technology to back up live virtual machines without downtime.

Progent is a certified Altaro partner and can provide a broad range of services to help you plan, deploy, optimize and troubleshoot a backup/restore solution based on the Altaro VM Backup platform. Progent also offers ProSight Data Protection Services managed backup to provide end-to-end monitoring and management of your backup ecosystem. Progent's Hyper-V consultants and VMware experts can help you design and manage virtual machine deployments that utilize on-premises or offsite VMs or that use a hybrid architecture that incorporates both local and cloud-based resources. In addition, Progent offers business continuity/disaster recovery (BCDR) planning consulting to help smaller organizations prepare for potentially catastrophic threats to business-critical data such as ransomware, human error, hardware failure and natural disasters.

Key Features of Altaro VM Backup
Altaro VM Backup is designed to handle the backup/restore requirements of most small businesses and combines simplicity of operation with a rich feature set that includes capabilities typically found only in enterprise-grade platforms. Altaro protects the most widely used versions of Hyper-V and VMware and supports popular backup media:

Altaro VM Backup includes powerful features in three crucial areas of data protection: backup/replication, restoration/disaster recovery, plus management and reporting.

Backup and Replication
Altaro VM Backup offers fast, efficient, and secure backup for data protection and archiving plus offsite replication for disaster recovery. Major backup and replication features include:

• Augmented Inline Deduplication: Inline variable block size deduplication sends only changed data to the backup device or site, conserving bandwidth, reducing storage requirements, and improving performance.
• Continuous Data Protection (CDP): Rather than run daily backups, you can reduce backup intervals to as short as five minutes to lower your Recovery Point Objective (RPO).
• Concurrency: You can back up multiple virtual machines simultaneously, which makes it possible to conduct backup operations during shorter off-hour time windows when more bandwidth is available and network performance is less critical.
• Live/Hot Backup: Integration with Microsoft Volume Shadow Copy Service allows you to back up virtual machines without incurring downtime.
• Cluster Shared Volumes & VMware vCenter: The ability to back up virtual machines running in a Hyper-V Failover Cluster (with or without cluster shared volumes) or in a VMware vCenter environment supports larger deployments.
• Offsite Replication: To facilitate disaster recovery, you can set up the Altaro Offsite Server tool on an external server for storing a copy of your backups at a different location.
• Flexible Scheduling and Retention Policies: You can set different backup schedules and retention policies for individual VMs.
  
  Backup scheduling and retention options for Altaro are easy to configure, review and update

• Application Consistent Backups: Altaro VM Backup can use Microsoft Volume Shadow Copy Service (VSS) and all VSS Writers running inside the protected VM when making a backup. Applications like Microsoft SQL and Exchange will be aware the backup has happened and automatically run the relevant maintenance tasks such as truncating transaction logs.
• Military-Grade Encryption: Prior to saving your data to a backup device, you have the option of encrypting it using 256-Bit AES Encryption.
• Virtual Disk Exclude: You can select which Virtual Disks to include or exclude in your VM backups.
• Grandfather-Father-Son Archiving (GFS): In addition to your continuous and daily backups, you can set up a special backup schedule to create and archive a new backup version every week, month and year.
• Cloud Backup to Azure: Altaro supports backup to an Azure Block Blob storage account, which is the most affordable storage option available on the Azure cloud.

Restore and Disaster Recovery
Altaro VM Backup includes a rich set of tools for point-in-time granular recovery of VMs and files that have been periodically backed up and need to be restored for any reason. In a disaster recovery scenario, Altaro has tools for quickly restoring an entire site from the latest replicated version stored offsite.

• Restore as Clone: You can restore a VM backup to a new location with a new name, allowing the cloned VM to run side by side with the original VM. This avoids the need to overwrite live VMs.
• Restore to Different Host: You can restore a VM backup to a different host. The VM will be restored to a new location on the new host and will be given a new name.
• Boot from Backup: You can instantly boot any VM version directly from the backup location either for verification purposes or to achieve a significant reduction in RTO (Recovery Time Objectives) in a disaster recovery scenario.
• File Level Restore: You can quickly restore individual files and folders from any VM backup.
• Microsoft Exchange Item Level Restore: You can restore individual emails from within the Exchange Mailbox database.
  
  Altaro VM Backup allows you to restore individual emails from an Exchange Mailbox

• Restore Different Versions: You can restore from multiple points in time rather than being limited to the latest backup
• Sandbox Restores and Verification: This features lets you schedule or manually launch test drills to confirm the integrity of your backup data. You can verify backup folders without attaching the VM to your Hyper-V or VMware Host, or you can run a complete test restore to a clone and ensure that the restored VM can boot.
• Backup Health Monitor: Backup storage integrity can be monitored proactively and repaired automatically as part of the next backup process.

How Progent Can Help You Benefit from Altaro VM Backup
Progent's Microsoft-certified Windows Server Hyper-V consultants and VMware-certified vSphere and vCenter consultants can help you plan, deploy and manage a backup/restore solution based on Altaro VM Backup. Progent's Exchange consultants can help you integrate Altaro VM Backup with your Exchange environment, and Progent's Azure hybrid cloud consulting specialists can show you how to use your Azure Block Blob storage account with Altaro to protect your VM backups. Progent's Business Continuity consultants can show you how Altaro VM Backup's replication features and offsite backup capability can help safeguard your mission-critical data and enable you to resume your core services quickly in case of a catastrophic event. Progent's GIAC-certified information assurance consultants can assess the security profile of your backup solution and can help you deploy the latest tools and follow industry best practices for operating safely in the modern threat landscape.

Additional Non-stop Solutions Offered by Progent
Progent's Microsoft and Cisco support professionals can assist your business to design a cost-effective, zero-downtime information network that addresses critical challenges covering a wide array of networking solutions and operations such as:

Disaster Recovery Planning
Progent's disaster recovery engineers can show you how to create a disaster recovery plan that will allow you to resume network functionality in case of an information network catastrophe. Progent can help you to define a comprehensive disaster recovery strategy that incorporates periodic disaster recovery evaluations and testing. Progent's Microsoft and Cisco-authorized engineers can also help you build an affordable, fault-tolerant system solution that addresses reliability issues involving a wide array of infrastructure technologies and procedures. For more information, see Disaster Recovery Expertise.

Managed Cloud Backup: ProSight Data Protection Services
ProSight Data Protection Services provide small and medium-sized organizations an affordable and fully managed solution for secure backup/disaster recovery (BDR). For a low monthly cost, ProSight Data Protection Services automates your backup processes and allows rapid recovery of critical files, applications and VMs that have become unavailable or damaged due to hardware failures, software bugs, disasters, human error, or malicious attacks like ransomware. ProSight Data Protection Services can help you protect, recover and restore files, folders, applications, system images, plus Hyper-V and VMware images/. Critical data can be backed up on the cloud, to a local storage device, or to both. Progent's backup and recovery specialists can deliver world-class support to configure ProSight Data Protection Services to be compliant with government and industry regulatory requirements like HIPAA, FIRPA, and PCI and, whenever necessary, can assist you to restore your critical information. Read more about ProSight Data Protection Services Managed Backup.

Microsoft Server 2016 Disaster Recovery
Progent's Windows Server 2016 disaster recovery experts can assist your organization to design a DR system based on Microsoft's most advanced Failover Clustering tools including Cluster OS Rolling Upgrade for non-intrusive migration to Windows Server 2016, Storage Replica for crash-consistent recovery, Storage Spaces Direct for high-performance storage clusters using low-cost hardware, Virtual Machine Load Balancing for enhancing the speed and resilience of Failover Clusters while reducing TCO and management overhead, and Cloud Witness for fast, affordable deployment of a failover cluster quorum arbitration point. To read more, visit Microsoft Windows Server 2016 Disaster Recovery Consulting.

Microsoft Server 2012 Failover Clusters
Microsoft Windows Server 2008 R2 introduced enterprise-class availability and recoverability to Microsoft's clustering platform. Microsoft Windows Server 2012 R2 adds to this foundation and delivers significant new and enhanced features offering increased scalability, better storage availability for server applications, simpler management, quicker automatic failover, and more flexibility for architecting clusters. For more information, go to Windows Server 2012 R2 Failover Clustering Migration and Support.

VMware Site Recovery Manager (SRM) Disaster Recovery Solutions
VMware's Site Recovery Manager (SRM) is an extension to VMware vCenter that allows you to define, automate and verify a consistent process for restoring services quickly following an outage. SRM provides centrally managed and automated recovery, application mobility, and non-disruptive site relocation, failback and re-protect. Site Recovery Manager also enables non-disruptive testing for disaster recovery, upgrades and fixes and can produce audit reports to confirm full service recovery, validate SLAs and prove disaster recovery compliance. Progent can provide the skills of a VCDX certified VMware Site Recovery Manager consultant to assist your organization to design, configure, test and administer a disaster recovery system based on VMware SRM.

NetApp MetroCluster High Availability and Disaster Recovery Technology
NetApp MetroCluster is a high-availability and disaster recovery platform that uses failover storage clustering along with replication to provide rapid, zero data loss disaster recovery between datacenters that are as far as 300km apart. Progent offers online or on-premises access to a NetApp MetroCluster expert who can help your business to plan, deploy, manage, update, test and repair a disaster recovery system based on NetApp MetroCluster. Progent can help you to choose a topology for your MetroCluster deployment that aligns with your technical needs and IT budget. Progent can make sure you follow leading practices for installing your MetroCluster environment by delivering guidance with tasks like assigning disk pools and shelf IDs, determining aggregate and plexes layout, setting up volumes, setting up NetApp Snapshot, installing Cisco and Brocade switches, designing a tiebreaker mechanism, setting up a configuration replication network between your peered clusters, and verifying your MetroCluster DR solution to prove adherence with industry standards and regulatory requirements.

Fault Tolerant Load Balancing
Progent offers high availability load balancing consulting that addresses network load balancing, load balanced programs, network infrastructure routing, and content delivery products including F5 Networks 3DNS. Fault tolerant load balancing solutions for which Progent can provide consulting expertise include Windows 2003 and 2008 Server Network Load Balancing Manager, Citrix Metaframe and Presentation Server, Cisco Content Services Switch, Cisco Content Engine and ACNS, and F5 Networks BIG-IP. To find out more, go to High Availability Load Balancing.

High-Availability Internet Data Centers
Progent's Data Center professionals can help you identify fault-tolerant data centers that meet the particular requirements of your company. High availability colocation sites are especially attractive to small and mid-size organizations because of their affordability and convenience compared to taking a do-it-yourself strategy. Trying to create an in-house data center that offers even a minimum degree of fault tolerance is too expensive for typical small businesses. Progent can show you how to reap all the advantages of high-availability colo sites by offering a full range of consulting and maintenance services. To read more, go to Fault Tolerant Colocation Solutions.

Fault Tolerant Branch Office Connectivity
Progent’s interoffice network infrastructure professionals can help companies achieve zero-downtime multi-site connectivity solutions via redundant networks featuring transparent failover. Progent’s Cisco-premier CCIE engineers can design and implement ultra-reliable Inter-office connections based on non-stop EIGRP routers or non-stop OSPF deployment of Cisco routers. Progent can demonstrate how multi-path connectivity and transparent fail-over can provide economical 24x7 interoffice connectivity. To find out more, go to High-Availability Inter-office Networking.

Fault Tolerant Internet Access
Progent's Cisco-certified network professionals can help you design an affordable, high availability Internet connection solution that can achieve non-stop Internet access via a wide array of high availability Internet network solutions including fault tolerant BGP, transparent fail-over, and multiple Internet Service Providers. Progent offers Cisco Certified Internetwork Expert professionals to help you utilize the most advanced technology for 24x7 Internet connections to implement an affordable, fully redundant Internet interface with automatic failover and other features to deliver non-stop Internet connections. For more information, see Fault Tolerant Internet Access Architecture.

Backup and Restore Technology Consultants
Progent can provide economical online support from IT engineers skilled in a wide range of utilities and services that provide solutions for protecting Microsoft Windows, Apple Mac, and Linux/UNIX physical and virtual servers and workstations plus notebooks and handhelds. Progent can provide help for leading backup products such as Acronis, Symantec Backup Exec, BackupAssist Software, CrashPlan, Double-Take Software, MozyPro, Retrospect for Macintosh, Time Machine, vSphere Data Protection, and Oracle Solaris FLARs. Progent's consultants can help your company to implement, upgrade, or maintain data backup solutions for a variety of topologies such as local, remote, cloud-based, or hybrid. To learn more, visit Backup and Restore Technology Expertise.

System Center Data Protection Manager (SCDPM) Backup and Recovery Consulting Services
Progent's expert System Center Data Protection Manager (SCDPM) support professionals can assist your company to develop a practical workplace recovery plan, design an affordable fault-tolerante IT architecture, install a Microsoft System Center Data Protection Manager-based backup and restore system, thoroughly validate your DPM system, educate your administrative staff or regular consultants how to maintain Microsoft System Center Data Protection Manager, or provide extensive information technology outsourcing services such as off-site hosting of Microsoft System Center Data Protection Manager servers in Progent's secure data center facility. For more information, go to Microsoft System Center Data Protection Manager Expertise.

Barracuda Backup Local, Offsite and Cloud Backup and Disaster Recovery
Barracuda Backup is an affordable, subscription backup and disaster recovery service for small and medium-size businesses. A Barracuda Backup solution can include a custom-designed hardware appliance manufactured by Barracuda or a virtual appliance with comparable features but which utilizes your existing storage infrastructure. Barracuda Backup protects vital company data generated locally, at one or more remote sites, or in the cloud. For disaster protection, you can replicate data to the Barracuda Cloud, to Amazon Web Services (AWS), or to any site with a Barracuda appliance. Progent is a Barracuda partner and Progent's Barracuda Backup consulting experts can provide a wide range of consulting services to help you to design, integrate, operate and troubleshoot a BDR solution built on Barracuda technology. For additional information, see Barracuda Backup and disaster recovery consulting and management.

Consulting Services Double-Take Solutions for Backup
Double-Take Software offers a selection of products intended to deliver small and midsize businesses a variety of affordable alternatives for backing up and restoring business-critical applications including Exchange Server, SQL Server, Blackberry, and Microsoft Office SharePoint. Progent’s disaster recovery planning experts have in-depth backgrounds integrating Double-Take Software technology into small company information networks to create an advanced level of fault tolerance and disaster recovery readiness at a budget-friendly price. To find out more, visit Consulting for Double-Take Solutions for Backup.

CRISC-Premier Network Risk Control
The Certified in Risk and Information Systems Control (CRISC) program was initiated by ISACA in 2010 to validate an IT professional's skills to design, implement, and support information system control mechanisms to reduce risk. Progent can provide the expertise of a CRISC-certified engineer to help your company to create and carry out a business continuity strategy that follows industry best practices promoted by CRISC and crafted to match your company's risk tolerance, business goals, and budgetary guidelines. To find out more, see CRISC-Certified network risk mitigation experts.

Why Pick Progent for Disaster Recovery/Business Continuity Planning?
Because Progent is a Microsoft Certified Partner and provides professional application expertise for a wide range of business applications, Progent is able to help clients to find efficient IT solutions that substantially enhance the productivity of your information system. As a Registered Partner with Cisco, Progent can provide the support of certified engineers and specialists with experience in architecting, configuring and maintaining networking solutions built on Cisco technology. The breadth of Progent's technical know-how and Progent's sensitivity to the requirements of small and midsize companies make Progent the perfect resource for creating and running an affordable, dependable network.

How You Can Get in Touch with Progent's Consultants for Business Continuity Planning Help
To contact Progent about engineering expertise for disaster recovery solutions, call 1-800-993-9400 or see Contact Progent.