Failover Server(s) or Standby Server(s) can be difficult to implement. If your servers are so mission critical that you can’t afford downtime, then you need solution that would be quick to restore and have your serves backup and running in the least amount of time. One solution is to have two servers that are identical – and for your IT staff to maintain both systems. You would need the same hardware in both the main server and backup server – which is costly. It is also costly to maintain both server’s from a maintenance and backup perspective. You also have to contend with synchronization between the two servers since you would have to restore any data changes on the main server to the backup server. Also, hardware that is updated on the main server has to also be updated on the backup server. If you had more than one mission critical server your costs would be in multiples. Good News! There is an easier way. Outsource the failover server or standby server to a vendor that specializes in these services.

A scalable, secure and highly available solution for failover server or standby server is the new virtualization solution which uses virtual machine technology to enable multiple operating systems to run concurrently on a single machine. You data will always be up-to-date and unexpected downtime will be drastically reduced. Virtualization increases the efficiency and the effectiveness of the disaster recovery process and offers cost-savings opportunities. You can implement disaster recovery with hardware that is not identical to the primary server and saves on hardware costs. Virtualization simplifies Server Backup Onsite disaster recovery operations and it is easier to recover a virtual machine than it is to recover a physical machine by using either tape-based or disk-based backups.

Failover server or standby server offers restoration of an entire server (aka server virtualization) . If your server is damaged beyond repair then replacement be expensive and time consuming. With virtualization, restoring a server is as simple as retrieving a copy of the virtual machine’s files and restoring them. This alone could reduce recovery time from hours or days to minutes. And even better, the vendor handles the work for you so that you don’t need trained IT staff and all the headaches that go with that. So, wow does it work?

Let’s say that you have four servers that are mission-critical (or any number of servers). Failover server using server virtualization will prevent data from being unavailable for any prolonged length of time. In a virtualization solution you would have a target server on your local network that would image your source server(s) and maintain real-time data replication without any intervention. You would also want it to provide these services with minimal impact on the existing network. The real-time copy of the data on the target computer can be used to resume running protected applications like email or database services if one or more source computers would be out of commission due to failure or disaster. You would need a single solution to continuously protect and recover the entire server, its operating system, applications, and data. It would also provide a significantly better BDR than existing solutions, such as tape backup.

I have only found one vendor that provides onsite managed failover server or better described as onsite failover using server virtualization. That company is www.granite-mountain.com. I am sure there will be more in the future as vendors don’t allow a competitive advantage to be exploited for very long.

A few more details if you are interested in reading more:

With failover server virtualization the VMware Converter is used to automate the creation of a virtual machine based on the physical server running in production. It then takes a snapshot of the source machines with no downtime on the source server. You could also have the choice of selecting which data volumes to protect. Without manually running backups of the source servers every night, this solution would run incremental on site backups every 15 minutes and updates the initial snapshot of the source servers. If a source server experiences a failure, such as a disk failure, the target virtual machine stands in for the source while resolving the production machine’s issues. During this time end-users would be using the target server just like it was the live production server. Backups would also continue to run to keep the image updated with current data and backups of additional servers can also continue at the same time. When the source machine is ready to be put back into production you can take the current snapshot on the target and push it back to the source with all the current data as if it never went down. If you had to totally replace the server with a different brand name you could use the backup image to perform a bare metal install on dissimilar hardware