By Tom Fedro
Last month, everyone here at Paragon Software was excited to learn that we reached a milestone: our backup and recovery software, Hard Disk Manager Server, road aboard the last flight of the Space Shuttle Atlantis. Watching liftoff was a bittersweet experience. I can remember when the first space shuttle mission took flight in 1981; Columbia landed in nearby Edwards Air Force base here in Southern California…the sonic boom was impressive. However, it was a sad day when America lost the Columbia and her crew.
So, you can imagine what a humbling experience it was to have Paragon’s disaster recovery tool be a part of the Shuttle program’s last historic flight. Operating under NASA’s Bioastronautics contract, Wyle and its subcontractor, Lockheed Martin selected Paragon’s backup and recovery software: Hard Disk Manager (HDM) 11 Professional.
Certification of the next generation ultrasound required being able to successfully restore the new ultrasound system to its launch configuration. As is often the case with space-related operations, a customized software solution was needed. The ease of performing a backup and restore process with the selected disaster recovery tool for the astronauts was also a priority.
Bioastronautics personnel evaluated several backup and recovery software solutions. Of the tools available, Paragon’s HDM 11 came closest to meeting the project’s needs. Our staff stepped in to close the gap by providing a customized solution designed to minimize user interaction, developing a restore script that automated the system restore process via a USB-bootable flash drive with the click of a button.
It was important to industry leaders Wyle and Lockheed Martin to ensure that the astronauts operating on the Space Station could quickly and easily restore their systems back to an operable state — with the customized version of Paragon’s backup and recovery software, Hard Disk Manager, they can recover in a matter of minutes without any additional disaster recovery tools.
Hopefully, there will come a time when NASA will rule Space in human flight missions someday soon.
HDM 11 Server provides a complete data backup and recovery software solution. A virtual add-on component is available for virtual environments. Both versions offer the ability to perform bare-metal restores, file-level recovery, includes advanced data wiping algorithms, and automatic partition alignment. Additionally, HDM 11 Server enables data back up or migration of an active server with locked volumes, files or folders.
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