Entries categorized under “Data Protection”

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)

Last week I saw a first-of-its-kind announcement in an April 9th press release from Asigra. What specifically caught my eye in the press release were some comments that Energy XXI had found that using disk in place of tape still proved too slow and unreliable while lacking offsite capabilities. Disk's inability to send data offsite came as no big surprise but the references in the press release to disk being too slow and unreliable when used in backup caught me a bit off-guard. (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)

I apologize to those of you who expected this SNW recap last Thursday or Friday. Wednesday ending up being busier than I expected and anyone who was flying last week knows about the challenges associated with air travel due to all of the grounded American flights, spring break, and ATA going bankrupt. Though I left on Thursday flying out on Midwest Airlines, the Midwest flight before mine to Milwaukee was canceled and my flight to Kansas City was delayed an hour due to a series of nasty storms going through the Midwest. (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 more pressing question is not which method should companies choose to encrypt data but, "How do companies generate and manage the encryption keys that are used to encrypt and decrypt the data?" The obstacle here is that there is no industry standard way to generate or manage encryption keys long term. (read more)

The last enterprise company at which I worked used at least five different products to do backup and there may have been more. This amalgamation of backup products occurred over a period of years and mostly by happenstance. Acquisitions of and mergers with other companies; internal consolidations; specific backup requirements for certain applications; and, as often as not, the right hand not knowing what the left hand was doing, contributed to the company ending up with a menagerie of backup products to manage. (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)

This last week Byte and Switch released an article covering Asigra's recent management hires that came on board to help Asigra expand more aggressively into the enterprise space. However, a viewpoint that crept into the article is a common but incorrect assumption that the size of the company and its clients is somehow indicative of the caliber of Asigra's Televaulting platform. (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)

InfiniVault presents itself as a network filer to server operating systems and uses a write-once file system so InfiniVault needs to theoretically manage an infinite number of files due to its infinite capacity capabilities. To explain how InfiniVault does this, both ProStor Systems' CEO, Steve Georgis, and CTO, Randy Kerns, explained why the number of files in most customer environments rarely becomes a compelling issue. Georgis says that ProStor Systems guarantees it will support 20 million files at the bare-minimum specification. While 100 million files should not be a problem, ProStor has not yet tested InfiniVault to verify it can reach that number. (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)

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)

Infinite. That's the number of files that the file system on ProStor Systems' InfiniVault archiving appliance can theoretically support. The problem with InfiniVault supporting an infinite number of files is how does that work under real-world conditions and how does anyone verify that number in order to have some level of assurance that it holds up? In ProStor Systems case, verifying its claim is more important than in the case of most other disk vendors since its disk-based InfiniVault also supports infinite storage capacity. (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)

VMware comes with more than its fair share of "gotchas" for the uninitiated and software licensing costs for VMware VMs are one "gotcha" that may sneak up on unsuspecting companies. Asigra Televaulting's capacity-based licensing model that is based on the size of the backup data store after it is globally deduplicated doesn't really get any better from a cost and management perspective. Since backup software is typically viewed as an expense by companies anyway, this licensing model ensures all data remains protected while adding minimal costs to the corporate bottom line. (read more)

The challenge that APTARE faces, however, is the same challenge that every other SRM vendor faces. Keep SRM software relevant in the face of declining storage capacity prices. This factor alone often makes it far too easy for companies to throw more storage capacity at the problem as opposed to trying to monitor and proactively manage it. Regardless of whether or not APTARE has the right architecture, they need to help break users of their storage consumption habit (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)

Can APTARE's StorageConsole remain relevant in 2008 and beyond? That was a question that weighed on my mind as I met with Rick Clark, APTARE's President and CEO, a couple of weeks ago. The purpose of the briefing: receive an update on what steps APTARE is taking to keep its StorageConsole 6.5 product alive and growing as the data protection space evolves. Of course, the particular challenge that StorageConsole needs to address now and in the coming years is managing the growing use of disk in data protection and start to wean itself off of managing tape-based backup. (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)

Asigra Televaulting's key value proposition is that it does not require administrators to install an agent on each VM. This is especially important in the new virtual world. Using Asigra Televaulting, its DS-Client automatically discovers all of the VMs on a VMware server. Once detected, the DS-Client displays the complete VMware installation tree (the physical server, the virtual machine/templates and each VM's directories and files) to the administrator. (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)

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)

CDP and deduplication are now on the forefront of the minds of more enterprise managers as they contemplate how to best introduce disk-based data protection into their backup environment. Contributing to the difficulty in selecting one of these technologies is that they address different data protection needs: CDP provides shorter application recovery time and point objectives while deduplication reduces disk data storage requirements. To better understand how Asigra's Televaulting delivers on these features in an agentless fashion, I spoke with Marc Staimer, President of Dragon Slayer Consulting. (read more)