This blog entry is the last in a series of interviews with Asigra’s CEO, David Farajun, where David looks at how Asigra Televaulting addresses new corporate concerns around information data protection and recovery.
In this third and final entry, David describes how Televaulting’s Data Collectors can share backup jobs across different machines, discover new virtual machines as they are created and how it scales to protect and recover enterprise environments.
Jerome: So how does Televaulting scale to backup and manage the hundreds or even thousands of servers that may be found in corporate production environments?
David: Companies could always run multiple Data Collectors on different physical or virtual machines to do data protection. However what is new in Televaulting v.8.0 is the capability to create a grid of DS-Clients that consists of multiple Data Collectors running on different physical or virtual machines on a single network.
In the Grid DS-Client, all Data Collectors access the same job scheduling database . As backup jobs finish on the Data Collectors on different machines, the machine’s resources can be dynamically re-allocated to other data protection jobs so the enterprise can finish its backup jobs more quickly.
Asigra Televaulting scales very well by providing the Grid DS-Client that works to backup all the sources’ data during the allotted backup window. It scales on the back-end storage as well by allowing a Grid of Vaults to work together to provide fault tolerance and load balancing. Asigra Televaulting scales its online storage as well by allowing additions of new storage locations on the fly for both primary data and long term storage.
Jerome: VMs are a growing part of more enterprise organizations. How does Asigra Televaulting discover new VMs as they are created and then back them up?
David: The Data Collectors can do an automated discovery of new VMs by connecting to either individual VMware ESX servers, XenSource servers or a Virtual Management Center, which stores and organizes data about physical hosts and VMs. The Data Collector provides a GUI that displays the new VMs that require backup so all an administrator needs to do is select the VM from the Televaulting management interface to initiate backups on those VMs.
Jerome: How do you address concerns about backing up the multiple types of applications and databases found in corporate environments?
David: Asigra provides support for nearly every major database and operating system available. Supported operating systems include different flavors of Linux, Unix, Windows and VMware while supported databases include DB2, Microsoft SQL, Oracle, MySQL , etc. We also support specific applications such as Microsoft Exchange, Microsoft Sharepoint and SAP for Oracle.
The other factor that Asigra accounts for is differences in database and file system behavior when they are backed up. To account for these differences, the Data Collectors measure LAN/WAN speed, available application resources and sub-system resources.
In part 1 of this series, David discussed how he has seen the data protection market evolve over the last 20 years.
In part 2 of this series, David explained why an appropriately configured Data Collector is so important to data protection and information recovery and what features Televaulting provides for long term data management and retention as well as shares his views on the use of removable media in data protection.