Entries categorized under “Continuous Data Protection”

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)

SharePoint Portal Sever was generally unprotected from 2003 through 2007 and couldn't be effectively supported in a disaster recovery/business continuity scenario. Thankfully Microsoft resolved that issue in SharePoint Portal Server 2007 by releasing a VSS writer for Microsoft SharePoint Portal Server. Earlier this year I explained what a VSS Writer did and how VSS works in a two part series Microsoft Volume Shadow Copy Service (VSS) for Continuous Data Protectio (Part 1) and Microsoft Volume Shadow Copy Service (VSS) for Continuous Data Protectio (Part 2). (read more)

InMage addressed the challenge of system recovery through replication. To do this they needed to be forward thinking about how they would replicate the data. InMage DR-Scout uses two data protection agents. The VX Agent manages volume/block based continuous data protection. Their FX Agent manages file based continuous data protection and works as the scheduler within the InMage system. (read more)

Once Energy XXI's IT Director Andrew Schaefer had determined that a traditional tape backup system was not going to fit the needs of Energy XXI long term, he began to explore the possibility of using a hosted third party backup and recovery solution. Driving this decision was a number of factors. (read more)

InMage has been protecting document management systems for many years. The challenge with protecting document management systems is similar. InMage must support a Microsoft SQL relational database and a file server component. At first glance it would seem that recovering these systems would be challenging because there are at least two components that must be backed up and recovered in tandem. (read more)

InMage Systems' DR-Scout is sometimes lumped in with other replication software products. However to do so is a mistake since not all replication software products are created equal. If anything, companies need to exercise more caution than ever when selecting replication software because of how its use is evolving in companies. While it was once primarily deployed as a means for failover and near-real time recovery of only mission-critical applications, it is becoming part of the everyday backup and recovery of all application data across the enterprise. (read more)

The first time I heard the architecture of InMage Systems' DR-Scout described as "host-offload", I thought I misunderstood the person. Then when the individual continued to use the term, I concluded that InMage Systems had come up with an ingenious way to make host agents sound more palatable to end-users but that it really was not any different than any other host based replication product. (read more)

The major difference between snapshots and CDP is that snapshots do not capture all application write I/Os like CDP. The reason that some argue that snapshots are as good as CDP is that companies can still achieve a point-in-time recovery when using snapshots in conjunction with database transaction logs. When doing a recovery, companies can select a specific snapshot and then replay the database's transaction logs from that point forward. This creates a point-in-time recovery similar to what CDP can deliver. Despite this similarity, CDP provides three fundamental advantages over using a combination of snapshots and database transaction logs for recovery. (read more)

Using the full VM backup, there are no choices of file type when doing recoveries; the Televaulting DS-Client backs up and manages the VM as a full image so companies can only recover the entire VM image. When doing these backups, the Televaulting DS-Client only backs up the VMware-specific files associated with a specific VM. Conversely a guest VM backup acts like a normal backup and treats the VM as it does any other server that is not virtualized. Therefore it has all of the normal backup and recovery options such as application awareness and the ability to perform selective backups of specific databases, emails and file systems. (read more)

"Can you recover your application data?" is not a trick question nor is it a technical mystery. The main problem with traditional backup software is that it was designed to solve yesterday's problems based on yesterday's computing infrastructures. In the past, companies essentially operated from 7 am until 7 pm giving IT the opportunity to run uninterrupted backup jobs at night; no one really expected IT to bring their applications back online in 30 minutes or less at the primary site, much less at a disaster recovery site; and companies did backup to tape, not disk. For the most part, companies pretty much held, and pretty much still do, hold their collective breathe if IT ever had to or has to recover any data at all. InMage Systems' DR-Scout gives companies a viable, proven alternative to not only provide application data recovery, but scales out to backup and recover LAN attached servers across the enterprise. (read more)

Companies are at the point where they can no longer ignore the protection and retention of corporate data outsite of the data center but cannot afford to throw unlimited resources at the problem either. InMage Systems' DR-Scout provides the new type of approach to backup and recovery that companies now need without breaking the budget. It provides the immediate benefits of a higher level of application availability that enterprise users are coming to want and expect while putting companies in an excellent position to deliver an achievable disaster recovery plan for many of their enterprise applications. (read more)

A question that I am asked more often as of late is why should companies use host-offloaded, real-time CDP software that companies like InMage Systems provide versus near-CDP (snapshots taken periodically) or even asynchronous replication technology? Asynchronous replication, near-CDP and real-time CDP bear some similarities in that all three technologies copy the write I/Os on a source system and then send the copied writes to a target system. They are also similar in that they first store a copy of the write I/O on a local disk cache on the source system; then send the copied writes to the target system as network bandwidth systems permits. It is at this juncture that the functionality of the three iterations of asynchronous replication begins to diverge. (read more)

Companies have a love-hate relationship with VMware. What companies are coming to realize is that introducing VMware into their environment needs to change their entire paradigm of how they manage servers - from the applications running on them to the data they protect. In the case of data protection, the change is even more extreme. Enterprise companies can not and should not expect their existing version of backup to work well in this new virtual world as it was designed to work from a totally different premise. This new data protection paradigm is what Asigra's Televaulting is designed to address. (read more)

This morning I wanted to provide an update to last Thursday's blog entry where I reported that Mendocino Software was reportedly shutting down. Since that entry, I have been in contact with HP's PR agency, Burson - Marstellar, who contacted HP on my behalf. Burson - Marstellar's representative responded back to me this morning saying that HP has no comment at this time about the situation. I also tried calling Mendocino Software last Thursday, Friday and then again today and left messages with their automated attendant. I have not received any callback from Mendocino Software in response to these messages. (read more)

No doubt that CDP has become an important market segment, described as "the future of backup'. Yet success in the CDP market isn't ubiquitous. The last few months I have heard reports that Mendocino Software, a provider of Continuous Data Protection (CDP) software for the enterprise computing market and which HP resells as its Continuous Information Capture (CICS) software, was in real trouble. Now the latest reports I am hearing is that Mendocino Software, like its predecessor Revivio before it, is being scrapped, selling off its intellectual property and assets and laying off its staff, having failed to close a new round of funding. (read more)

File based CDP is much broader, in that it doesn't take into consideration application data. It simply copies file data from one system to the other. However, all files have what we security professionals like to call a "security descriptor." In Microsoft Windows a security descriptor has four key pieces: (1) The discretionary access control list (DACL); (2) the System Access Control List (SACL); (3) the Group creator, and (4) the Owner creator. (read more)

In analyzing InMage DR-Scout and the backup, archiving and recovery industry in general, I'm always digging a little deeper for success stories, technology improvements and corporate histories. In early January, Rajeev Alturi and I spoke by phone on a quiet Saturday afternoon. Rajeev and I discussed the nuances of Microsoft's VSS and how InMage leverages the technology, regardless of operating system, chipset and application system versions. (read more)

Microsoft Exchange continues to be a mission critical application in business and organizations of all sizes.  If during a working day email data is lost or deleted, it's the responsibility of users and administrators to recovery it.  User's can use... (read more)

Given the mission critical nature of Exchange, I have focused lately on writing about Microsoft Exchange high-availability and data recovery for consistent databases. What an administrator really needs is the ability to provide disaster recovery and data recovery, in a single application and administrative console. Scalability which is critical in high-availability is achievable with host-offloaded CDP solutions such as InMage's DR-Scout. (read more)

Since LLR is only configurable in Microsoft Cluster environments, it leads one to believe Microsoft Clustering is the best and only option to ensure consistent high-availability for Microsoft Exchange 2007. However, that is not so in all cases. During my research on LLR I talked to Utah State University about their cluster, backup and recovery infrastructure. During my discussion with Daniel Muller, IT System Administration Operations at Utah State University, I learned that Utah State University took a unique approach to Exchange data recovery and availability. (read more)

First a little bit about me. I've been working with Microsoft Exchange since Exchange 4.0 in 1996. I've spent a number of years architecting, administrating and teaching others the various facets of the product. Moreover, I spent considerable time with... (read more)