The Online Hot Spare service completes the trio of elements to the total Business Continuity Service and is dependent on both Remote Backup and System Snapshot.

Online Hot Spare is ideal for the business that simply cannot tolerate more than a few hours of system downtime and need their business servers to function properly at all times. Online Hot Spare provides a business with the reassurance of a disaster recovery plan that is usually only affordable to very large enterprises.

The principal behind Online Hot Spare is through a combination of Remote Backup and System Snapshot together with a managed, hosted server 'tenancy', a business has the facility to restore their business systems very quickly onto servers at a remote datacentre without needing to concern themselves with finding replacement hardware or premises on which to restore their systems. If disaster were to strike, either through failure of a companies system hardware or even to the extent that their entire office premises were destroyed, they can call upon ITbuilder to restore an exact copy of their servers and keep data accessible, mail moving, information available and business processes flowing.

With the business data already backing up daily to the ITbuilder data-centre, we combine this with a periodic collection schedule of your System Snapshot images that are physically transported and loaded onto our own high-end, clustered server hardware. Loading of the server images onto reserved space on our server cluster represents the 'tenancy' arrangement and server images are updated at a pre-agreed schedule to ensure that they are always reasonably up-to-date. Each time a server image is loaded onto the server cluster, it is booted up and checked for inegrity to ensure it is working in the event of it being called upon in a disaster scenario.

If the worst happens and a business is faced with a prolonged period of system downtime, we are able to invoke a documented plan to start up the hot spare servers and restore from the last Remote Backup. With the restored servers now running in a remote datacentre, we can invoke a documented plan to switch access to the systems at their temporary location to keep the business functioning.

When the incident that resulted in the switch over to the Online Hot Spare system has been resolved, a process of transferring the snapshot images back to the original configuration can be executed.