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). (read more)

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 DR-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. (read more)

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)

InMage Systems' DR-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 first time I heard the architecture of InMage Systems' DR-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)

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)

"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' DR-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)

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' DR-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)

A question that I am asked more often as of late is why should companies use host-offloaded, real-time CDP software that companies like InMage Systems provide versus near-CDP (snapshots taken periodically) or even asynchronous replication technology? Asynchronous replication, near-CDP and real-time CDP bear some similarities in that all three technologies copy the write I/Os on a source system and then send the copied writes to a target system. They are also similar in that they first store a copy of the write I/O on a local disk cache on the source system; then send the copied writes to the target system as network bandwidth systems permits. It is at this juncture that the functionality of the three iterations of asynchronous replication begins to diverge. (read more)

File based CDP is much broader, in that it doesn't take into consideration application data. It simply copies file data from one system to the other. However, all files have what we security professionals like to call a "security descriptor." In Microsoft Windows a security descriptor has four key pieces: (1) The discretionary access control list (DACL); (2) the System Access Control List (SACL); (3) the Group creator, and (4) the Owner creator. (read more)