Entries categorized under “Business Continuity”

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 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)

Should there be a "Use more, pay more" fee for Internet use? Should the cost of sending a text message to Grandma about junior's birthday party be the same as the cost of sending the entire video of junior's birthday party? How much of the Internet is a person or company entitled to? These were some of the questions that CIO magazine's Gary Beach recently attempted to address in a video commentary, Net Neutrality: Why the Internet Can't Remain Free, which recently appeared on CIO magazine's website. (read more)

InMage Systems' 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' 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)

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' 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' 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)

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 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 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)