Category: Inmage

Selecting the right business continuity software can rank right up there as one of the more difficult decisions that companies face. No two companies have exactly the same environment or business continuity requirements and rarely is there a meaningful way for any company to quickly and effectively test business continuity software across all of the applications in their enterprise. As a result, companies are often put in the position where they need to select the best software for their environment with only some of the facts in hand and then hope they don’t live to regret the decision.

Here’s a question for you to answer. Backup software and continuous data protection (CDP) software: same or different? And if different, is CDP software a replacement kind of different or a complimentary kind of different? This is a critical question for companies to answer as they contemplate the adoption of CDP software in their enterprise because the answer to it influences how companies spend their money and in what circumstances.

There is one word more so than any other that strikes fear in the hearts of systems administrators, data center managers and CIOs: Change. It’s ironic that change carries such a negative connotation in businesses and especially in IT. IT is one of the fastest changing components within business and failing to plan for and make regular changes to its IT infrastructure is a recipe for a company loosing its competitive edge.

Anyone who is any way involved with trying to implement an enterprise business continuity solution probably knows all too well the compromises they frequently have to make. As enterprise companies try to centralize and deliver enterprise data protection and business continuity across all of their application servers, they are consistently faced with an unpleasant trade-off: Spend a fortune and do your best to guarantee high availability or create a standard, affordable way to do data protection that fails to meet many of your application’s specific recovery needs.

Part of the reason companies are reluctant to go forward on enterprise-wide business continuity solutions is the complexity associated with implementing them. Enterprise-wide business continuity solutions typically rely upon a conglomeration of point products to protect and recover data. Backup software, host and storage system-based replication software and application specific replication software, among others, are just some of the software products that companies use. The trick is configuring, managing and monitoring these point products in such a way that they work together in a cohesive, unified manner. Not only is this nearly impossible to do, the cost and complexity of performing these tasks can quickly escalate when trying to manage and recover multiple applications across the enterprise at the same time.

A survey that appeared in the May 2008 issue of Storage Magazine indicated that DR testing is not routine for all business. That’s probably the understatement of the year. Of those users surveyed, fully half (48%) do not regularly perform testing and, of those that do, they most often test those applications deemed “mission critical”.

Storage managers are regularly put in a position where they need to replace a component of their computing infrastructure. But if you ask them about their druthers as to what they would prefer to replace – hardware or software – almost to a person they would say the computer hardware. However which is older in technology terms – the three year old hardware or the ten year old software? Looking at it this way can suddenly change one’s opinion about which of the two is due for a swap-out.

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).

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.

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.