BUMI Adds Virtual Data Center To Disaster Recovery

Cloud backup and recovery provider BUMI has introduced a new disaster recovery solution that allows businesses who experience a disaster to quickly get back online via a virtual data center.

The new BUMI Cloud Recovery service now allows a business' entire server infrastructure to be temporarily recovered to virtual servers hosted in its cloud data centers; this in turn allows customers to quickly restart operations while they arrange for replacement hardware or a new data center, said Jennifer Walzer, CEO of the New York-based company.

BUMI, short for Backup My Info!, has offered the capability to recover data from the cloud in case of a disaster, but clients who have not invested in duplicate hardware or some type of disaster recovery site may find themselves unable to recover operations quickly enough to take advantage of getting the data back online, Walzer said.

"In a disaster, customers need to procure new hardware, or have hardware on standby," she said. "We find customers need to get back up quickly if a disaster strikes. So we added the ability to restore their entire business environment to our virtual data center."

The BUMI Cloud Recovery service gives customers the time to get their new hardware or data center ready for use by letting them run their business using virtual servers via the Internet.

When a customer signs on for the service, BUMI documents the entire server environment and sets up a virtual version of that environment. In the event of a disaster, the customer's operations would fail over to the virtual infrastructure, giving access to the data via remote devices, Walzer said.

To ensure that recovery from the virtualized environment, BUMI requires customers to do an actual failover to the BUMI infrastructure, and then restore back to their physical infrastructure, she said.

"Other vendors don't do a disaster recovery drill," she said. "They can't be sure everything will run correctly. And we request customers do a disaster recovery test once a year. We can't force them to do it. But we can point out that the test is a part of a disaster recovery best practice. But all our customers who have signed up so far said they will do the test."

Walzer said it is amazing ho many business never test their disaster recovery plans. "It's almost amusing how many companies call and say, 'My provider told me it would work,'" she said. "Traditional disaster recovery testing is a hassle because of the need to assemble the hardware. We do DR to the cloud. We can do it while keeping customers in their production environment."

A customer's data is backed up continually, and according to tests conducted on actual customers' environments, it takes an average of five hours to be up and running in the cloud with the BUMI Cloud Recovery service, Walzer said.

The service costs $200 per month per server. The annual test, after the first year, costs $750 per server.

BUMI works with solution providers who get a percentage of the service as recurring revenue. Solution providers can also provided other value-add services including set-up and on-going consulting related to the disaster recovery service.