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"InMage DR-Scout software offers a new way of thinking about disaster recovery. We talked to a lot of customers, and came to a profound conclusion: Companies had a total lack of flexibility in deploying and managing their DR solutions. InMage solves these problems by providing a flexible, scalable and heterogeneous Disaster Recovery solution that allows them to proactively protect their data. DR-Scout offers our customers an adaptable, modular approach that doesn't require a forklift upgrade or consume the entire IT budget."
- Kumar Malavalli
Co-Founder, Chairman and Chief Strategy Officer of InMage
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Push-button Exchange Failover
Businesses today rely heavily on email and messaging systems, and when a company's Exchange server goes down it can have devastating effects on business productivity. With DR-Scout this issue has been eliminated. With the push of a button, your organization can failover your critical applications from the primary site to a secondary server or site in case of a disaster - in a matter of just a few minutes. This provides true data protection without losing valuable emails.
Automated Alerts
Administrators can be notified via an SNMP alert or email when an Exchange server is having problems or when too much network congestion impacts your disaster recovery policies. Even if the disaster is the result of a virus, worm or database corruption your email system will be secure and available since you can roll-back quickly to the exact storage group state just before the failure event occurred.
CDP Means Total Recovery
DR-Scout performs continuous backup to low-cost secondary disk, providing a high level of protection without significantly impacting network performance. Whether you need to restore an individual message, a mailbox or database or if you desire to failover your Exchange server due to failure or maintenance procedures all of these capabilities are integrated into DR-Scout.
Continuous Data Protection, or CDP, has been hailed as a true breakthrough in the ongoing effort to ensure business continuity and data/application availability. In the past, companies relied on taking periodic backups in the hope that, should a key system go down, they could restore the data from backup tapes. As the amount of data to be protected grew, and backup windows began to shrink in today's 24x7 environments, a new protection method was needed. Fortunately, the advent of low-cost disk storage paved the way for CDP - a method of continuously backing up important data at the transaction level to disk in a way that makes it very easy to recover or failover quickly in the event of a minor or even a major disaster.
InMage has taken the concept of CDP a quantum leap further than other vendors. Rather than simply rely on time-stamping each block, with the resultant ability to restore to a given point in time, InMage actually INTEGRATES datasets with the application state. This means that you can actually restore back to an event-tagged dataset and be assured that the application will come up correctly with that dataset.
Event-based restore: Application Consistency
Unlike other vendors, who promise "event-based restoration" but in reality can only restore to a given moment in time, DR-Scout provides intelligent application consistency enforcement. This allows you to actually bookmark specific events in a way that correlates all the relevant applications with the state of the data. With DR-Scout you can bookmark anything important to your operations or business: any transaction over $1M, a major software service pack, a month-end closing...anything that is relevant for your business. To restore to that event, simply point at the bookmark and your system is recovered exactly where it was when the event occurred.
With other products, you may only be able to go back to a daily backup tape, with gaping windows of missing data. Other products may claim to provide event-based restoration, but in reality they force you to manually find, for every server and every application, the specific point in time when that event occurred. Then it is a painful process of manually correlating all the data, hoping you haven't missed a critical component.
How it Works:
DR-Scout provides non-disruptive Continuous Data Protection to allow for instant recovery back to any point in time or any business event. Unlike other host-only based approaches that severely impact production servers, DR-Scout offloads retention, encryption, and compression functions to an out-of-band server. The diagram below shows a typical implementation.
Unique Features and Benefits:
Fast, Reliable Operational Recovery:In less than a minute, DR-Scout can generate a view of a volume as it existed 20 seconds ago, or a file as it was one week ago and anything in between. Contrast this with other vendors' products that can only deal with daily backups, with an extremely slow restore from tape, or more coarsely-grained time intervals. Today's business cannot afford to lose a day's, an hour's, or even a minute's work. With DR-Scout, you have true continuous data protection and recovery in a snap.
Industrial-Strength Hybrid CDP: Our patent-pending approach provides a hybrid approach, combining the best of host-based and network-based architectures without the drawbacks of either. Organizations that use DR-Scout avoid the pitfalls of traditional array-based approaches which are very costly and tied to a proprietary, inflexible architecture. They also avoid the problems associated with host-based approaches that limit performance with the overhead of server-based software that consumes high CPU cycles. With DR-Scout a small and light-weight agent runs on the application server, but sends the data to an out-of-band server that does all the "heavy lifting" such as compression and encryption, caching and pathing.
Event-Level Recovery: InMage is the inventor of Event-Level Recovery. While other vendors talk about recovering to a specific event, only InMage solutions can actually accomplish this since we focus solely on the data, and are not application-aware. This means that, while they may be able to recover to a specific point in time, they are not able to provide the exact business context that is so often needed in a major or minor crisis. DR-Scout has built-in integration with applications such as databases (SQL, Oracle), email servers (Exchange) and file servers. DR-Scout also enables synchronized data protection of multi-server applications such as ERP installations. Only DR-Scout allows you to insert Event Bookmarks into the change data stream, and use them for fast recovery point selection.
Elimination of Backup Window: As the amount of data grows and the backup window shrinks, companies are struggling to deal with a bad situation that is made worse by slow, labor-intensive recovery processes and the ever-present threat of lost data. DR-Scout solves the problem by eliminating the backup window from your production servers altogether while ensuring the 100% protection coverage you were missing before. By continuously storing changes to secondary storage, critical application data is available at any time without adversely impacting application servers. Intelligent management software compresses data, and allows IT to schedule periodic backups to long-term storage, maximizing productivity and WAN capacity. Exchange log management is also built in to provide a complete Exchange backup solution.
Cost Savings: Tremendous cost savings can be achieved with DR-Scout. As a software-only solution, it is architected to work with off-the-shelf hardware. Heterogeneous support avoids the costs incurred by vendor lock-in as with array-based approaches. You can have weeks of online protection for critical data and applications, avoiding costly downtime. With DR-Scout, you can use inexpensive disk as the backup media, while periodically (and in a controlled fashion) offloading data to a tape or MAID library for long-term retention using existing tape backup software.
Non-Disruptive Approach: Many companies have suffered at the hands of vendors who purported to sell a CDP solution, but in fact have only succeeded in disrupting normal operations. With InMage, there is no need for reformatting or migration of the user's existing data. The product works transparently with both existing and new application installations. In addition, DR-Scout VX (for volume CDP) and DR-Scout FX (for file-level data protection) are designed to handle most outages without requiring an expensive data resynchronization operation. This means better productivity and fewer administrative headaches for various failure conditions that beset your operations.
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