Entries categorized under “Disaster Recovery”

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)

Storage managers are regularly put in a position where they need to replace a component of their computing infrastructure. But if you ask them about their druthers as to what they would prefer to replace - hardware or software - almost to a person they would say the computer hardware. However which is older in technology terms - the three year old hardware or the ten year old software? Looking at it this way can suddenly change one's opinion about which of the two is due for a swap-out. (read more)

One of the more agonizing choices that some companies face when looking to implement the same deduplication scheme across the enterprise is quantifying which version of deduplication to use: inline or post-processing. From a purist's viewpoint, inline (deduplicating data as it is ingested) is sometimes viewed as the best approach since data is deduplicated immediately as it is ingested. (read more)

Quantum is aiming for the enterprise with its deduplication technology and looks to make a serious run at the enterprise datacenter with its DXi7500. Designed to anchor Quantum's deduplication strategy, companies can use the scalable DXi7500 when it is receiving replicated data from Quantum's DXi3500 or DXi5500 appliances in remote offices; replicating to disaster recovery site(s); or deduplicating terabytes of data during nightly backup jobs in the datacenter. To accomplish this, Quantum designed the DXi7500 to become the focal point for its DXi portfolio. (read more)

I started out the day with an hour-long briefing with Xiotech's CTO Stephen J Sicola and Storage Architect Peter Selin. Xiotech has been talking up a storm about the ground-shaking importance of its new Intelligent Storage Elements (ISE) ever since Xiotech announced it at Storage Networking World about a month ago. However Xiotech and I have not had a chance to connect for me to take a close look at its architecture so Stephen and Peter spent some time talking me through it. (read more)

One thing that struck me was that Compellent users really understand what a game-changing technology that virtualization is. I sat through 2 or 3 presentations during the two days of the conference (May 7 - 8) and also met with a fair number of users (~10) between sessions, over meals and at the evening events and all of them were pretty stoked about the capabilities that virtualization in general and Compellent specifically delivers. (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)

As its name suggests, Compellent's Storage Center is a compelling product for companies to evaluate but they need to exercise caution in how they implement it and in what circumstances. Compellent's Data Instant Replay feature should match the snapshot capabilities of other storage systems and exceed many in its recovery capabilities. However Compellent's use of thin provisioning to provide this feature should give companies pause about what types of application data they should migrate to Storage Center and what other promised benefits of its thin provisioning feature it will not be able to deliver. (read more)

Someone once said to me that making changes in an enterprise mission-critical production data center storage area network (SAN) is akin to changing the wheels on a 747 as it is taking off. There is no room for error, you better be damn good at what you are doing and you need at least three back out plans in your back pocket should something go wrong. So what does this have to do with Continuity Software's RecoverGuard? RecoverGuard's premise is that it monitors the hardware on SANs at the production and disaster recovery sites and gathers information about their configuration. Once gathered, it compares the information and reports on the discrepancies that exist between production and disaster recovery sites. (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)

Vendors that have largely staked their entire livelihood around building software based on the Microsoft Windows operating system now face a less certain future as the corporate adoption of server virtualization and VMware begins. While the Microsoft Windows operating system is not going anywhere, VMware is taking center stage in more corporate plans and data center budgets for 2008 and beyond. So it is should come as no surprise that Double-Take Software (NASDAQ: DBTK) continues to enhance its Double-Take for VMware Infrastructure product line to directly address this ongoing corporate adoption of VMware. (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)

LeftHand Networks' new focus on SMBs and ROBOs is seen in today's new product offering - their Virtual SAN Appliance (VSA). It provides for failover between different VMware ESX servers using VMware's VMotion feature without a requirement for an external iSCSI or FC SAN. LeftHand Networks circumvents this requirement for an external SAN by using its SAN/iQ software to virtualize disk (internal or external) on each VMware server and then creating a cluster of VMs on different VMware physical servers. (read more)

Steven: The global storage market is currently a $45 billion a year industry and it is anticipated to grow to $50 billion a year by 2010 with archived storage forecast to increase from $9 billion in 2007 to $23 billion in 2010. Of the data that is currently stored to disk, 80% of that data is fixed content data that is rarely accessed and can be preserved in archives. We offer companies a third tier of storage that looks and acts like disk, has the properties of tape, and uses policy based software to manage data retention and compliance. Companies are looking very closely at the benefits of the technology. Plasmon archive solutions with UDO meet long term retention requirements at a cost businesses need. (read more)

When a specific product receives recognition or an award from an independent third party, it is always a cause for celebration. Both NEC's HYDRAstor and CommVault's Galaxy received Storage magazine and searchstorage.com's Gold award in their respective 2007 Product of the Year "Backup and Disaster Recovery Hardware" and "Backup and Disaster Recovery Software" categories. However it was much more than a "win" for either of these a products; rather it was a validation of years of research and hard work to deliver products that met the tactical needs of today's businesses and are also designed to meet their more strategic needs of backup and disaster recovery going forward. (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)

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)

I am a fan of CDP in general and InMage's DR-Scout in particular because of its off-host architecture and InMage's mid-term CDP roadmap. However, what I am most in favor of is users identifying technologies that alleviate some of their backup and recovery woes and make data protection easier in the process. While my conversation with Ryan helped to remind me was that at the end of the day, simplifying data protection is what InMage does best. (read more)