Entries categorized under “Continuous Data Protection”

Bounce the phrase "consolidated recovery" off of most individuals in IT and you are just as likely to get a blank stare as a good answer as to what it means or how to accomplish it. Most IT staff keeps so busy on a day to day basis just managing their assortment of backup, clustering and replication products that they never get much beyond focusing on the protection and recovery of each application. So for them to contemplate the consolidation of protection and recovery using just one methodology has more than likely not even crossed their minds. (read more)

Synchronous replication may be viewed by users as the "Gold' standard when it comes to achieving the highest levels of application availability for business continuity and disaster recovery. But as I previously discussed, using synchronous replication for business continuity and disaster recovery can actually take longer and cost more for organizations to remotely recover applications than if they use asynchronous replication. Now organizations can use asynchronous software like InMage Systems DR-Scout to deliver the same or better results as synchronous replication at a substantially lower cost. (read more)

Replication software is increasingly entering the conversation as the logical replacement for backup software in client environments. Yet replicating data is really the easy part. Integrating the replication software so it becomes part of the fabric of a company's infrastructure is a far more difficult task. It is also one of the reasons that replication software has, to date, made so little headway in terms of displacing backup software for enterprise wide data protection. But as replication software matures, that will change. (read more)

To understand a specific company's technology, sometimes you have to do more than just understand the company behind the product, you have to understand the philosophy of the company behind the product. That was probably what impressed me the most when I recently had a briefing with Fadi Albatal, FalconStor's Director of Product Marketing. Yes, we went over FalconStor's new HyperTrac Backup Accelerator for VMware feature, but what really piqued my interest was how HyperTrac fits into FalconStor's overall data protection methodology and why FalconStor's customers can anticipate further innovations like this in the future. (read more)

One of the more critical pieces of information that organizations need as they put together a disaster recovery plan is how much data they have in their environment and how quickly it is changing. The reason this information is so important is that without it, organizations often have no way to effectively size how much or what type of capacity they need to protect and recover their production data. In fact, I was astonished at how little information this was available about this topic or the fact that there were so few good articles on the subject. (read more)

"We're all doomed!" That phrase appeared in a recent Computerworld headline and encapsulates the feelings that some individuals are having during this current economic crisis. While the headline goes on to conclude that the end of the world is probably not at hand, the text of the article explains that many companies are experiencing financial troubles and need to shift gears in terms of how they act during this economic downturn. Among the actions that the author recommends a company should pursue is taking the time to evaluate every supplier and only pursue those that deliver results for the company. But what are the benchmarks by which companies should measure these results and how are these results measured when it comes to technology? (read more)

Many of the clients I work with are taking a closer look at their data protection solutions. Currently much of their focus is on trying to decide between purchasing additional storage (disk or tape), replication licensing, or deduplicating virtual tape library (VTL) technologies. The trouble is there are so many data protection products that the selection process becomes extraordinarily complex. So while companies may think of data protection as a singular function or strategy, companies will employ multiple strategies, staff and point products in order to attain a form of universal data protection. (read more)

Today's tough economic times are changing many aspects of the way businesses run that range from the way businesses promote themselves to the way they purchase products or support their growth internally. Yet one thing that all businesses have in common is that tough economic times force them to focus on their core objectives and how well their current technologies are delivering on meeting these goals. As companies go through these self-examinations, businesses tend to discover that the promised features of technologies they purchased in the past may turn out to provide them far less value than they anticipated or are becoming irrelevant as their infrastructures evolve. Nowhere does this hold truer than with their approach to enterprise data protection. (read more)

As 2009 approaches, the traditional benchmarks for enterprise backup software such as the management of physical tape libraries, support for multiple operating systems and SAN backups are yesterday's news. Instead support for backup to disk, continuous data protection (CDP), protection for laptops and desktops and a common repository where protected data is stored, deduplicated and available for rapid access and search is how enterprise data protection software is now defined and measured. Yet even when one factors in these new benchmarks for enterprise data protection, how products such as Atempo Time Navigator play in this rapidly evolving space, and in which verticals they best play, are less than intuitive to the untrained eye. (read more)

A few years ago an article appeared on TechTarget's SearchDataManagement site that examined the top 10 reasons that disaster recovery plans fail. Granted, that article is over three years old but the points that the author makes are just as valid now as they were then even though from a technology perspective a lot has changed. (read more)

Continuous data protection has long been a staple for R1Soft on the Linux platform. With 90,000 to 95,000 servers protected by R1Soft's continuous data protection (CDP) product for Linux, one can only wonder how their recent release of CDP for the Windows platform will prevail. It was my pleasure to speak with David Wartell, VP and Founder of R1Soft about this new offering, what it entails, and how it will affect future Windows backups. (read more)

An area that is often overlooked in an IT infrastructure, at least until it's needed, is the backup and recovery environment. Then when the realization hits the company that it needs backup software, it's typically complex to install, configure and maintain, even in small environments, because of the fact that backup consists of so many moving parts (backup servers, tape robots, disk-based arrays, SAN networks, etc.). The good news is that more hardware and software vendors are stepping up to the plate and partnering to take some of the complexity out of installing and configuring backup software in these size environments. The most recent announcement between Dell and Symantec is the latest in the growing number of symbiotic relationships between hardware and software vendors in the backup space. (read more)

The analogy that business continuity software is a lot like automobile insurance is a valid comparison to make. Companies buy business continuity software for the same reasons that they buy automobile insurance: protection against unexpected loss. In fact, most companies cannot fathom NOT buying automobile insurance since if their employees are driving company vehicles and are involved in some type of wreak it presents an incalculable and unforeseen financial risk to the company's bottom line. It is for the same reason that companies buy business continuity software for their corporate applications - they need similar levels of assurance that their data is protected and is readily available in the event that they have to bring their applications back online should a man-made or natural disaster occur. (read more)

Most enterprise companies share one thing in common: they are most comfortable doing business with other enterprise companies. Buying from other enterprise companies gives the purchasing company some level of confidence that, after they make the acquisition, the other company will be around to provide support for the product. It is only when the costs of purchasing technology from another enterprise company are so outrageous, and do not come with similar assurances of success, that sometimes one has to innovate. (read more)

Organizations do not like to think about business continuity for some very simple reasons: it's costly, it's complex and it exposes to companies just how vulnerable they really are should a disaster occur. So companies tend to live in denial about implementing a business continuity solution until some triggering event occurs that makes them have to deal with the problem head on. (read more)

Breaking new ground or turf wars? That's the question that crossed my mind when I heard that Symantec combined its Backup Exec and NetBackup product groups into one new Data Protection Group earlier this year. One of two things can happen in a scenario when you merge the engineering teams of the two data protection product market leaders, NetBackup and Backup Exec, into one. You either get outright war where nothing gets done and everything devolves into turf wars; or the two teams put aside their egos so they can take advantage of the new synergies that come from working together and sharing common code. So far, it strikes me more as the latter. (read more)

The benefits that continuous data protection (CDP) technology provides as part of a company's overall data protection strategy are becoming more evident everyday. Point-in-time restores, faster recoveries and off-site replication of data for disaster recoveries are just some of the benefits that companies using CDP are already experiencing. However one of the challenges that companies may encounter as they look to deploy CDP that may hinder or even prevent its adoption is the need to deploy host agents on servers. (read more)

At the turn of the millennium, email in general and Microsoft Exchange specifically became the must-have corporate application. Today businesses cannot imagine how they ever functioned without Exchange as it has become the most mission critical application in most organizations. Now that same experience is again repeating itself as companies come to understand the power of Microsoft SharePoint and what it means in terms of improved productivity for their employees. The bad news is that as more companies adopt SharePoint as a key application, they are encountering the same problems protecting and recovering SharePoint data that they used to encounter with Exchange. (read more)

Any type of business continuity software that a company uses has a catch: the first task after the software is installed is to create a full copy of the production data at the disaster recovery (DR) site. What options the business continuity software provides to copy the data to the DR site is of a primary concern to businesses since it impacts what data is copied, how much data is copied and what type of planning companies have to do ahead of time. (read more)

Selecting the right business continuity software can rank right up there as one of the more difficult decisions that companies face. No two companies have exactly the same environment or business continuity requirements and rarely is there a meaningful way for any company to quickly and effectively test business continuity software across all of the applications in their enterprise. As a result, companies are often put in the position where they need to select the best software for their environment with only some of the facts in hand and then hope they don't live to regret the decision. (read more)

Here's a question for you to answer. Backup software and continuous data protection (CDP) software: same or different? And if different, is CDP software a replacement kind of different or a complimentary kind of different? This is a critical question for companies to answer as they contemplate the adoption of CDP software in their enterprise because the answer to it influences how companies spend their money and in what circumstances. (read more)

In looking back at the earliest generations of Information Lifecycle Management (ILM), Business Analytics and Data Loss Prevention (DLP) products, we can see a wasteland of interesting technology that was too early for the market. We are now seeing the hints of resurgence in products adjacent to enterprise discovery based on the 'secondary benefits' of corporate archiving, preservation and collection. Basically, corporations seem to be recognizing that the infrastructure required to establish an efficient, defensible discovery process can and should be leveraged to provide other business functionality. (read more)

Anyone who is any way involved with trying to implement an enterprise business continuity solution probably knows all too well the compromises they frequently have to make. As enterprise companies try to centralize and deliver enterprise data protection and business continuity across all of their application servers, they are consistently faced with an unpleasant trade-off: Spend a fortune and do your best to guarantee high availability or create a standard, affordable way to do data protection that fails to meet many of your application's specific recovery needs. (read more)

Part of the reason companies are reluctant to go forward on enterprise-wide business continuity solutions is the complexity associated with implementing them. Enterprise-wide business continuity solutions typically rely upon a conglomeration of point products to protect and recover data. Backup software, host and storage system-based replication software and application specific replication software, among others, are just some of the software products that companies use. The trick is configuring, managing and monitoring these point products in such a way that they work together in a cohesive, unified manner. Not only is this nearly impossible to do, the cost and complexity of performing these tasks can quickly escalate when trying to manage and recover multiple applications across the enterprise at the same time. (read more)

A survey that appeared in the May 2008 issue of Storage Magazine indicated that DR testing is not routine for all business. That's probably the understatement of the year. Of those users surveyed, fully half (48%) do not regularly perform testing and, of those that do, they most often test those applications deemed "mission critical". (read more)