Bare Metal Restore

[puggit]

I'm currently having an argument with my boss and the company CTO on whether we offer Bare Metal Restore in our products...

So: How would you define BMR? The easy bit is the recovering on to Bare Metal (or empty disk...)

[thepassenger]

Personally when someone suggest "Bare Metal" I don't think of blank disks.
I think of litterally bare metal (i.e. an empty or heavily damaged steel/aluminium chassis) so unless you guys offer a service whereby you'll panel beat out and repear a physically damaged system until it's firing up and running your products I'd argue that no, you don't offer BMR.

Sorry it's just the word metal that does it. If they mean "Bare System Recovery" then that's easy... can you products be put on to a brand new virgin HDD and have the system boot and function, if yes then you do. If no then you don't.

Just my take on it naturally

[puggit]

Thanks Sarah - what kind of steps would you expect the process to take?

Our product takes a number of steps, but I would define BMR as one step (ie stick a CD in and the rest is automated...)

[thepassenger]

If your talking about bear metal, I'd say the steps would start with a panel beating mallet and move on eventually to swapping broken PCB's and stuff.

In your example though, sticking in a bootable tape or DVD and hitting 'go' and having a totally wiped (no OS) system rebuild itself with minimal user intervention (tape/disk swapping allowed) would count as a bare system restore capability.

[aldi]

I wouldnt mind a few steps, as long as they are straightforward and well documented.

e.g.
step 1 - follow prompts & restore OS
step 2 - install default config
step 3 - restore config & data

Doesnt strictly have to be a one botton thing IMO. Certainly if someone described a bare metal restore containing a couple of simple steps I wouldnt sit there fuming about it. OTOH if the process required your full attention for hours on end then that would be pushing it a bit.

[roadsweeper]

A bare metal restore is nothing to do with the number of manual steps involved, though obviously the fewer the better generally speaking. It is generally accepted as meaning that a solution can restore an identical (or the repaired original) piece of hardware back to it's fully functional state without the pre-installation of the Operating System or other software. Wikipedia have a basic definion here that in my opinion can be accepted as describing the widely-used meaning of the term.

FYI: The next step on from basic bare metal restore allows the restore to be performed onto different hardware with the utilisation of only the software drivers for any different components, say a video card. This can obviously be useful where the orginal hardware cannot be repaired and an exact duplicate is not available. I suppose it's probably also useful for transferring systems one one piece of hadrware to another in a non-emergency scenario.

HTH

roadie.