InMage Scout: Disaster Recovery

Guest Column: 40% Of InMage Systems Customers See A 200% Return On Investment By Jerome M Wendt, DCIG LLC

InMage's claim to provide the industry's most WAN-efficient DR solution is based on the fact that we use an innovative combination of continuous data protection (CDP), asynchronous replication, application failover/failback, and WAN optimization technologies together in a product focused on providing fast, reliable recovery for data and/or applications. InMage Scout provides for granular recovery capabilities that can meet the most stringent RPO/RTO requirements while completely eliminating backups as a discrete operation. InMage deployments can be configured to support long distance disaster recovery (DR) requirements, local recovery requirements to meet daily restore requests, and to automate recovery all the way up to the level of the application service (e.g. Exchange, Oracle, Blackberry Server, etc.). InMage Scout is a software-based solution that supports heterogeneous servers and storage, physical, virtual, or mixed physical/virtual server environments for all three major server virtualization vendors, and leverages disk as the underlying media for recovery purposes.

Several features set InMage apart from other vendors in the disk-based recovery space. The first one of these is our efficiency in WAN environments. Because InMage Scout uses CDP as a core technology, and CDP focuses on just collecting changes at the block level, we start out with a very efficient foundation. As data is transferred across WANs for DR purposes, we use WAN optimization technologies like TCP optimization and compression to keep network bandwidth requirements to a minimum. The fact that we replicate at the block instead of the file level provides for a maximally efficient solution as well. Taken together, these technologies minimize the amount of data that has to be sent across networks to enable recoveries, regardless of whether those are remote or local, include just data, or require full recovery of application services.

Another feature that sets us apart is the comprehensiveness of our recovery solution. Other vendors with solutions in the DR and backup space focus on providing data recovery, leaving it up to administrators to get applications back up and running. Data recovery provides a strong foundation, but alone is not sufficient to meet comprehensive recovery needs. Data is only useful when applications that can use that data are available, and application recovery must be addressed as well to ensure continued business operations. Application recovery generally requires human intervention, further adding to infrastructure complexity, cost, and recovery risk. InMage provides a single platform that not only delivers granular data recovery in remote or local sites, but also offers automated application recovery for any application. By going this extra step, InMage covers the entire range of infrastructure recovery requirements that are associated with a particular application service.

Finally, we use a unique hybrid recovery technology that off-loads all the capture and recovery processing from production servers that are being protected. This allows us to provide very rich functionality while limiting host overhead to 2%. As important as this is in physical server environments, it is even more critical in virtual server environments where virtual servers are generally running at very high utilization ratios. If CPU overhead is a concern, InMage Scout provides an excellent recovery solution that covers remote and local requirements, for both data and applications.