- Organisations can now remain in business whilst physical machines are repaired -

London, 28 June, 2010 – StorageCraft UK (www.storagecraft.co.uk), the provider of disaster recovery, system migration, data protection and security solutions for servers, desktops and laptops, announces the launch of VirtualBoot™ to enable temporary restoration of servers and keep organisations in business whilst repairs to physical machines are made.

VirtualBoot, which is part of the latest version of its flagship ShadowProtect suite, improves on the original virtualisation features, such as Hardware Independent Restore (HIR), to give administrators the ability to boot any ShadowProtect backup image into a virtual machine using Sun/Oracle VirtualBox. To do this IT administrators simply need to right-click on the ShadowProtect backup image file and boot it as a virtual machine, which takes approximately two minutes, regardless of the size of the server or backup image; even terabytes can be booted in a few minutes.

Speaking about the introduction of VirtualBoot Tammie Coles, European Business Development Director at StorageCraft comments, “Using VirtualBoot SMBs can quickly and easily undertake a temporary restoration of their servers whilst an IT technician repairs the physical machine to get it back up and running. When the repairs have been completed the technician can simply restore the original disk image to the physical server and then add any incremental images made while the system was running under VirtualBoot. This saves an incredible amount of time and significantly reduces the Recovery Time Objective to almost nil, which is the goal we and our clients strive to achieve. “

Speaking on the benefits of VirtualBoot Coles continues, “In addition to the clear benefits here in terms of maximising storage capacity and enabling companies to continue to work as normal whilst servers are being repaired, VirtualBoot offers significant benefits in terms of data security. The fact that ShadowProtect continues to make regular backups within the Virtual Box environment, whilst the VirtualBoot version of the server is running ensures that the company data is secure at all times.“

In addition to the functionality offered by VirtualBoot, ShadowProtect also allows easy migration from physical environments to virtual ones, and from virtual to physical — or any combination of the two (P2P, P2V, V2V or V2P). In conjunction with the Hardware Independent Restore™ technology in ShadowProtect, which enables organisations to change environment no matter what kind of hardware they are switching to or from, this offers significant savings in terms of recovery times and costs.

As Scott Barnes, StorageCraft CTO explains, “The new features in ShadowProtect, such as VirtualBoot, will give IT administrators more flexible options for getting their systems and data back online very quickly. Backup is easy and everyone is doing it. Restoring massive amounts of data quickly and making it accessible is the difficult part. ShadowProtect’s advanced technology helps get business back online in minutes, not hours or days.”

Alongside VirtualBoot, ShadowProtect now offers functionality that enables all backup images to be converted into a virtual machine either in .VHD or .VMDK format without the need to use any third-party technology, providing greater flexibility and control over your systems. As Coles concludes, “If you’re looking to move your data between physical and virtual environments without losing the ability to effectively protect it once it is virtualised ShadowProtect offers an unparalleled opportunity for you. The combination of the virtualisation features and the plethora of recovery options that are built into ShadowProtect allow you to dramatically reduce the time your systems and data are offline whilst keeping track of changes to your systems. In business terms this provides significant security for SMBs whose bottom line and ability to function is tied to the availability of their data.”