Displacing Backup is the New End Game for Replication Software

Replication software is increasingly entering the conversation as the logical replacement for backup software in client environments. Yet replicating data is really the easy part. Integrating the replication software so it becomes part of the fabric of a company's infrastructure is a far more difficult task. It is also one of the reasons that replication software has, to date, made so little headway in terms of displacing backup software for enterprise wide data protection. But as replication software matures, that will change.

I recently had a chance to speak with Peter O'Brien, InMage Systems Vice President of Business Development, about what features he now sees driving the adoption of InMage Systems' Scout in customer accounts. While Scout continues to have success as a business continuity solution, he sees more companies starting to use it to address other immediate business needs that they have. For instance, one company recently started to use Scout to measure and forecast data change rates in its environment.

But displacing backup software with replication software on servers is becoming the new end game for replication software. Replication software will never completely replace backup software as backup software is still needed to manage tape drives and tape libraries as well as the tape cartridges themselves. However replication software is certainly becoming a more viable option to displace backup software on the servers as more environments move towards disk as a backup target. Further, more organizations need near-zero backup windows and faster recovery times which are features that replication software, not backup software, is better equipped to provide.

So why have companies not adopted replication software already? The answer is simple according to O'Brien. Most replication software does not provide enough other functionality that organizations need to justify its wide-scale implementation. Features that he sees as replication software needing to do a better job of providing are the support of data movement, data migrations and greater application extensibility.

He notes that replication software received a big boost over the last few years with the introduction of continuous data protection (CDP) technology that tracks most or all changes to production data. But CDP alone has not been enough to push replication over the top. Backup software has decades of technology behind it, a management interface and policies that administrators are accustomed to using and deep integration with the many applications that it protects.

The other issue is that as organizational data stores continue to grow, administrators need simple and effective ways to migrate and move this data locally and remotely. Pure replication software may or may not handle this task very well or, if it does, it only moves or migrates for one server or one application, not every server in the enterprise. As a result, it is really not suitable for wide scale deployment.

But a number of things have changed in the last few years that now make replication software products like Scout viable for enterprise wide deployments including:

• Improve data movement and migration capabilities. Scout can move and migrate data between different storage platforms so organizations can recover data locally or remotely.
• It has application level plug-ins. This means that as replication occurs, Scout prompts the applications to flush their buffers and create consistent recovery points. These consistent recovery points can be used for remote recoveries or even as a source for off-host backups.
• It can manage multiple replication jobs from a central console. Scout does not require administrators to log onto a specific console on each server in a replication pair. Rather it can manage replication and recovery for all servers performing replication from a central console which is needed for enterprise deployments.

In talking to O'Brien, it is clear that replication software in general and products that provide CDP functionality have come a long way in the last few years. While they are not all of the way there yet, the gap has narrowed significantly and I would expect by late 2009 or sometime in 2010, the final step in the process - a tight integration between backup software and replication software - will be complete. At that point - "Watch out!" as the reasons to replace backup software with replication software will become so compelling that organizations will have no excuse not to do so.