Near Real Time Data Protection is the New Must Have

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 due to the introduce of disk in the backup process. While replication software 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.

The legacy of a number of Windows and Linux-based replication software products was to solve a very specific problem in corporate data centers: provide near real-time server failover of mission-critical applications. In some cases, the availability of replication software pre-dated the availability of clustering solutions for the Windows and Linux operating systems so it was put in the position of having to provide real or near-real time failover capabilities for the operating system and the application. However as clustering found its way into operating systems, replication software started to evolve to take on a new, broader role: data protection for all corporate servers.

This evolution puts traditional replication software in more direct, head-to-head competition with backup software though we are just starting to see competition between the two. Most companies still need inexpensive media on which to store data so they rely upon backup software to copy their data and store it to tape. However that is changing. Low cost, high capacity SATA-based storage systems that meet enterprise availability and reliability requirements are now readily available even as user and management appetites for near-real time recovery for all corporate enterprise servers are growing. This combination of factors indicates that the time has come for disk-based backup.

This does not mean that traditional backup software and replication software are changing their underlying designs. Companies can configure backup software to backup to disk, but it will only backup data once a day to disk, not tape. This leaves any changes to corporate data between each backup window unprotected and exposed.

Replication software captures all of these changes but its objective is to provide an application recovery should the primary server fail so it captures every change but does not track and retain previous changes. Instead, it presumes companies want to recover applications to the last saved write, not some previous point-in-time, as replication software was designed to protect companies against server hardware failures.

This makes neither backup software nor replication software suitable to meet today's larger enterprise corporate data protection needs. The window that backup software leaves between each backup is too long. Replication software does not provide previous point-in-time data recovery options since it replicates all data - good and bad - and if the data it replicates is bad due to a data corruption, companies will need to recover the application backup software since it stores and manages multiple copies of the data.

It is these deficiencies in backup and replication software that InMage Systems' DR-Scout addresses. While it is replication software in the sense that it copies every change to application data, it also functions like backup software since it provides companies with a nearly infinite number of point-in-times to which they can recover their data. Since it combines these two functions in one product, companies can rely on one product regardless of what type of recovery they need to perform.

The corporate requirements for a standard method to deliver near real time data protection across the enterprise have changed significantly in the last decade. To only have the option to recover once-a-day or at the last point-in-time is too simplistic and no longer meets corporate expectations. InMage Systems' DR-Scout brings these two into balance. It gives companies the range of recovery options that they expect for their corporate servers at a cost that is in-line with what they pay to manage their backups now without introducing new levels of management complexity.