By Tom Fedro
Paragon Software made history last month as its backup and recovery software rode aboard the last flight of the Space Shuttle Atlantis. 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.
With such an amazing history surrounding the space shuttle program, it was a humbling experience to have Paragon’s disaster recovery tool be a part of the 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 technology 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 major 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 to the click of a button via a USB-bootable flash drive.
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 soon when NASA will again be empowered to explore the heavens with human flight missions.