The need for IT disaster recovery is inevitable, and an organization’s response toward various types of disasters like power failures, computer viruses and attacks by hackers is determined by its level of preparedness. Critical information has to be safely backed up and stored in secure locations so that it is safe from potential disasters sites. One unique concept that can be applied towards any disaster recovery initiative is the concept of server imaging.

Server imaging is a comprehensive method involving an array of automated provisioning methodologies and concepts that can be applied towards both physical and virtual servers from centralized administrative consoles. This particular concept is vital towards scaling, recovery and migration for existing server environments, and system users can capture live system images from either physical or virtual servers.

This image include the entire system specific information and involves the operating system, e-mails, configuration settings, mission critical data files, patches, application updates, programs and operating systems. These images can then be stored and provided whenever they are being needed to be used in restoring either a physical or virtual server regardless of the kind of hardware used – the same image can also be used across major operating systems and hypervisors.

This implies that immediately after a fatal system disaster, it is possible to restore the affected system to its previous state without necessarily losing any piece of data. In turn, this means that lost and corrupted files and folders, including system related files and folders, can be restored to their previous state.

During the server imaging process, a live system disk image is normally developed without necessarily shutting down the server. With such privileges in place, the organization continues with its operations when server imaging is being conducted and this means that productivity is maintained while at the same time counter measures are being utilized.

This in return minimizes on downtime. When server imaging is taking place, the enterprise does not necessarily have to worry about extensive data losses or performing time consuming system re-installations.

One of the key benefits associated with server imaging is consistency or uniform standard across an enterprise. When a computer operating system is installed, it is normally configured to work on one specific machine with its own software, configurations and machine specific settings.

When an image is take out from this machine, all the settings and configurations will also be taken, and these same settings and configurations can then be applied on other machines installed within the enterprise network. Hence, all machines will now share the same setting and configurations, similar to the imaged system.

Server imaging is quite different with other server backup solutions which only generate copies of application specific files. Server imaging techniques generate complete or rather a replica image of the server or any other mission critical hardware device. Some of the images derived may include may include operating system, user data files, application data and boot records.

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