In the last few years, companies of all sizes have discovered the advantages of using disk as a target in the backup process. Driven by disk’s dropping costs, larger capacities, end-user intolerance for failed backups and faster recovery speeds, companies are switching to disk as their primary target for backup and recovery in droves.
Virtualization is having the same type of revolutionary impact on corporate data centers that using disk as part of the data protection process has had. Though companies utilize virtualization in many ways, server virtualization is where its impact is most apparent. VMware, Virtual Iron and Xen are contributing to server virtualization’s current growth while Hyper-V in Microsoft’s Windows Server 2008 is poised to join the virtualization fray this summer.
In the face of these fundamental shifts among corporate data centers in server data protection and virtualization, data protection software needs to do more than just adapt. It needs to embrace backup-to-disk and server virtualization in order to transform data protection software into an information recovery platform. That is exactly what today’s 8.0 release of Asigra Televaulting brings to the table in the following three ways:
First, Televaulting 8.0 introduces on-demand grid computing. Televaulting has used an agentless architecture since its inception. However its DS-Clients (its agentless backup servers) were configured as one-to-many. This architecture precluded a single DS-Client from helping other DS-Clients complete backup jobs in enterprise shops with large numbers of servers – physical or virtual.
Using Televaulting 8.0’s new on-demand grid computing architecture, a parent DS-Client is now created that is aware of the other child DS-Clients residing on virtual or physical machines in the backup environment. As child DS-Clients complete backup jobs assigned to them, they notify the parent DS-Client that its jobs are completed and that it can help other child DS-Clients complete their assigned backup jobs. The parent DS-Client then re-distributes jobs from busy child DS-Clients to the idling child DS-Client so it can help in the backup process.
Second, as I go to storage conferences and speak to end-users, the wide-scale acceptance and adoption of wide area replication astounds me. The size of the company no longer matters. Whether they as small, medium or large, companies want this feature because they understand the age of recovering data anywhere, anytime, and anyplace is upon them.
Multi-directional Data Center Replication in Televaulting 8.0 addresses this growing enterprise need. Asigra Televaulting has for years deduplicated and then replicated data from remote sites back to its central site. However, enterprise companies may have multiple data centers with a need to replicate data between these sites. The Multi-directional Data Center Replication in Televaulting 8.0 capitalizes on the new on-demand grid computing architecture to create an “N+1” configuration. Using “N+1”, DS-Systems (the parent Televaulting server into which child DS-Clients feed their data) are aware of each other, sending and receiving backup data to one another. A DS-System can also take over for a DS-System at another site should it fail or need to go off-line for maintenance.
Finally, Asigra Televaulting has always used disk as its primary target for backup but treated all files as the same and worked on the assumption that there was only one tier of disk. Televaulting 8.0 makes no such assumption. Instead, it leverage its knowledge about the files it is protecting (age, size, date last accessed, etc.) plus it now understands that multiple tiers of disk (Fibre channel, SATA, MAID) may exist.
By using this knowledge about the data and disk storage systems, Televaulting 8.0 introduces intelligent archiving as a feature set by placing a server’s most active data on FC disk to improve performance during backups and recoveries. However it can store infrequently accessed data on SATA or MAID disk storage systems to take advantage of their lower disk costs and higher capacities while minimizing power consumption.
Asigra recognizes that a fundamental shift is occurring in data protection and it is about more than just supporting or adapting to backup to disk or virtual machines – it is about embracing them. Televaulting 8.0 takes this next logical step in its product evolution by not just adapting to these technologies but making them core to its next generation of prodcut. The introduction of on-demand grid computing, multi-directional replication and intelligent archiving in the newest version of Televaulting 8.0 demonstrate Asigra is committed to helping its clients usher in a new era of information recovery.