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Integrated WAN Resiliency and Management
Bandwidth is expensive and in many companies is in short supply. It is also frequently the most difficult resource to manage and contain, since it is often outsourced. Given that the WAN is used for mission-critical, production work, it is important to optimize WAN usage so that Disaster Recovery functions do not impact business.
DR-Scout manages this scarce commodity carefully. Sophisticated compression, coalescing and de-duplication ensure that the smallest possible amount of data is sent across the WAN. Intelligent bandwidth usage and throttling, coupled with information tiering, ensure that resources are optimized while business continuity is ensured. If there are severe traffic congestion issues or the WAN link goes down for any length of time, other solutions require a time-consuming and laborious resynchronization or re-mirroring when the WAN links once again become operational. With DR-Scout the off-load appliance provides the requisite buffer and draining capabilities to accommodate WAN anomalies elastically, thus removing any disruptions to your DR implementation.
WAN Management
In most organizations, the WAN link to a remote site is shared by both the production data and the backup/recovery data. Organizations have long looked for a way to optimally use this bandwidth, to make sure critical data can be stored and restored without impeding productivity. In many cases it is extremely difficult to get this bandwidth, either for long-term storage or for recovery operations.
What happens when the WAN link goes down or gets very congested for some reason? With other products, the real-time change data (also known as deltas) have to be queued up somewhere. With traditional host-based solutions or array-based solutions, this queue has a finite pre-provisioned limit and is maintained on the production infrastructure itself. It is important to note that production infrastructure is being used to buffer against WAN link problems. When this is done, the enterprise runs the additional risk of WAN link outages causing production performance issues such as application slowdowns. And when the queue limit is exceeded, which is often the case with outages of any significant length of time, the data between the two sites go out of sync necessitating a full fixed amount of resources.
How it Works:
InMage has solved a key problem that besets today's approaches to remote replication. With DR-Scout, the delta queuing is done completely outside of the production infrastructure, thus decoupling WAN link problems from production servers and storage altogether. The amount of queuing is simply dependent on the amount of secondary disk attached to the DR-Scout appliance. Furthermore, in the extreme event that the secondary disk is fully utilized due to a seriously long WAN outage, the DR-Scout VX host agent simply maintains the metadata of the changes using a fixed amount of resources.
DR-Scout allows the administrator to manage the bandwidth by policy-driven control. With a variety of options, the customer can fine-tune WAN usage. For example, 70% of the WAN usage might be allocated to production work during that day, while at night that number could drop to 20%, enabling scheduled backups from secondary storage.
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 an hour ago, or a file as it was one minute ago. 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 CPU cycles. A small and light-weight agent runs on the application server, but sends the data to an out-of-band application that does all the "heavy lifting" such as compression and encryption.
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 they 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 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% time 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.
Cost Savings: Tremendous cost savings can be achieved with the 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 local 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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