Stac R eplica 3 For NT Prevents Data Disasters By Jeff Newman   When critical components of servers fail or a disaster strikes, we silently cross our fingers as we rush to restore the most current data. The truth is, most backup solutions aren't complete and can be time-consuming when you need them to be perfect and fast. That's why backup strategies are constantly being refined and developed. Now Stac is pushing the envelope with its Replica data protection line. In our San Mateo, Calif., lab, we tested a beta version of Stac's latest edition--Replica 3 for Windows NT, the first version of this product for the Microsoft Windows NT platform. It's modeled after the Novell NetWare version but tailored to NT. Although the Replica series isn't as comprehensive as multiplatform backup strat egies or as complex as most high-end hierarchical storage management (HSM) solutions, it offers a high-performance, foolproof disaster-recovery plan for NT networks at an attractive price. No Need for Prayers Replica is designed to reliably back up NT servers as quickly as possible. To speed this process, Stac eliminates the overhead of backing up files individually. Instead, it treats the NT server as a set of objects. Stac's Object Replication Technology copies a logical block-by-block capture of NT servers to the secondary storage device or another primary storage device. We were able to back up 1,200.7 MB of data in 37 minutes, which is as fast as our tape drive. We were impressed with the GUI-based management program's ease of use. It lets you schedule and perform replication, perform restores, do tape housekeeping and tests, and create disaster-recovery disks. Replica let us configure and replicate any licensed NT server from any NT Server, NT workstation or Windows95 workstation. The me nus are a snap, letting you prepare and label tapes for replication. After selecting the volumes we wanted to rep licate, along with the destination medium and label, Replica gave us accurate predictions of the required capacity and a fairly accurate estimate of the time required to perform the task. We had the option of performing the replication immediately or scheduling the task for off-peak hours. To perform disaster recovery, Replica uses four floppy disks that are created through the management program periodically. These disks hold information about the structure and the server so that Stac's disaster-recovery system can reconstruct the server as it was at the last backup. Three of these disks are a modification of the three NT setup disks created by the NT installation program. To prepare for disaster recovery, go to the utilities menu and simply click on a button to tell the program where to create these disks. To see what would happen when a unit--such as our primary IDE hard drive--failed , we replaced it with a blank hard drive and rebooted. We inserted the modified NT recovery disks and brought the system back up. About 40 minutes and a few floppy changes later, we were back online with every volume restored. We were impressed, too, with Replica's Direct Media Access feature, which lets you mount volumes from the tape as spare virtual drives, making the tape's data readily accessible. Jeff Newman can be reached at jnewman@nwc.com.

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