Master? Is That You?
IS/R is pieced together from existing technologies, and that includes the mastering system for storing the suspended virtual machines. Kozuch says all it will take is an off-the-shelf system that keeps track of a set of files that describe your environment. It would be rather large, says Kozuch, but "could be a distributed file server or web server. It would have its own off-the-shelf backup system, as if someone had a picture of your entire C:drive, but you could ask for just pieces of it. You can go to any of these blank machines and start using them in minutes or less (the same way you would get to any other pieces on a network)."