Category: Asigra Inc

In this entry, David explains why an appropriately configured Data Collector is so important to data protection and information recovery and what features Asigra has introduced into Televaulting in time to ensure its Data Collectors are appropriately configured in order to optimize the management and placement of data long term. David also shares his views on the use of removable media in data protection and information recovery.

Hard-disk drive storage is taking center stage as the preferred media for enterprise archiving, data protection and information recovery needs. But as the shift to using disk for long term data storage needs occurs, companies are coming to realize that the software that they have relied on for years is, in many instances, poorly equipped to deal with the management of hard-disks as part of their larger data management scheme. Optimizing the placement of data on hard-disks, replicating data to disk storage systems at different sites and then recovering the data are new challenges that companies face as they introduce larger capacity hard-disks into their environment.

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 ways:

One of my favorite shows to watch is nightly reruns of Jim Cramer’s Mad Money on CNBC. Aside from his crazy antics and “They Know Nothing” sound effect, he provides some good laughs just before I call it a night. Part of the reason that I find him so entertaining is that he is not necessarily in a position where he has to be politically correct – though some might argue he no longer has to be a good stock picker either, but that’s a topic for another day.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.