Woburn, MA. BridgeHead Software is introducing a new performance audit service for its HT Backup software which is designed to ensure customers’ backup and restore systems continue to provide effective, error free data protection as IT systems, staff and underlying business needs change.
Steve Matheson Vice President Sales North America at BridgeHead Software explains why it is vital for customers to perform a regular review of backup as provided by the new HT Backup Health Check performance audit:
“A lot could have changed in your IT set up and data requirements since you installed your backup system. Are you sure everything’s still being backed up? Can any new staff successfully restore data in the event of failure? Is the system being monitored and are backups running in the most effective and efficient way? These are the sorts of areas that our new HT Backup Health Check is designed to identify and address.”
The new Health Check service ensures that everything in the backup environment is finely tuned and running efficiently and error free. New requirements are addressed and potential problems are targeted before they emerge.
“With IT teams juggling so many priorities, they may think it’s best to leave things as they are, unless they actually experience a problem with backup. But if you don’t do a periodic audit to make sure your system’s still meeting all your needs, you could be leaving your data at risk. We came across one hospital that had failed to spot that their backups had not been running properly for two years,” said Matheson.
The Health Check is performed by BridgeHead Software’s Senior Technical Support Engineers and includes the engineers working with customers’ IT staff to perform actual test restores to ensure data recovery procedures are well understood and staff have no problems recovering critical data if the need arises.
A key element is a comprehensive review of all backup objects to identify whether improvements can be made to the existing configuration. This could result in faster backup times, faster restore times or possibly less tape usage.
Backup logs and system logs are checked and out of date areas flagged and upgraded, with software error messages being diagnosed and corrected where possible. Tape retention periods are reviewed to ensure they are sufficient for configured generations and a status audit is conducted on available scratch tapes.
Current backup schedules are scrutinized to make sure they continue to address business requirements and refresher training is provided to enable staff to stay fully up-to-speed on how to monitor and run the backup and recovery process.
The Health Check is available in two different levels and customers are given a comprehensive Health Check Report upon completion which includes a checklist of everything that was verified, its current state and any comments or recommendations.
“Our aim is to ensure that customers can rest easy that they have the optimum backup system for their needs, ensuring backups are running properly and efficiently, minimizing the chances of downtime in the event of a disaster and helping IT staff to feel comfortable with the backup and restore process,” said Matheson.
BridgeHead Software’s HT Backup provides enterprise wide data protection for all data, regardless of platform, format, or physical location. Its platform support includes Windows, UNIX, Linux, NetWare, OpenVMS, and other legacy platforms. It is capable of backing up data to any remote location in the network and supports both disk and tape as target media and it provides agents to optimize live backup for most common database applications.
Media Contact:
ProAmericas Pubic Relations for BridgeHead Software
Mark Rieger, markr@proamericas.com 303-520-4524


