InMage Scout uses CDP to protect physical and virtual environments. InMage founder and CTO Rajeev Atluri said the key enhancement in InMage 5.5 is a sparse retention feature for data reduction in which older data is not backed up as often as new data. Along with keeping fewer application recovery points for older data, Atluri said Scout uses thin provisioning to only back up used storage capacity, and then compresses all backed up data. Atluri claims it can reduce capacity requirements five times compared to traditional CDP software.
Requires Free Membership to View
When you register for SearchDisasterRecovery.com, you’ll also receive targeted emails from my team of award-winning editorial writers. As you know, an interruption can threaten your organization at any time – and it’s our goal to ensure you’re armed with the right tips and information to help you ensure a swift recovery.
Rich Castagna, Editorial Director
"We are true CDP but we are more practical," said Atluri. "We don't journal everything. In our case, we make one initial copy and then only collect the changed bytes. You are eliminating the full copies. In plain CDP, you retain everything. It's overkill to retain everything for six months. As data gets older, you don't need to keep everything." InMage Scout also optimizes recovery performance for mail and mailbox-level recovery for Exchange, built-in log management for applications and virtual snapshots for archival tape. Atluri said Scout can back up 1 TB of data in 20 minutes or fewer.
When installed, InMage makes a baseline copy of data at the target location. After that, it only captures and sends changes of protected data from the source to the target. InMage claims Scout 5.5 can shrink data as much as traditional data deduplication through its sparse retention and compression.
InMage also increased platform support to include Exchange 2010, SharePoint 2010, BES 5.01, MySQL 5.1 applications and vSphere 4.x. It also supports Windows 2008 R2, RHEL 5.4/5.5, OEL, XenServer 5.5u2, 5.6 and OpenSolaris 5.11 platforms.
InMage adds disaster recovery for SMBs, too
InMage took steps to simplify disaster recovery for small- to medium-sized businesses (SMBs) earlier this month when it introduced its vContinuum application for recovery of VMware ESX and vSphere virtual machines. Atluri said the goal of vContinuum was to provide one product for data backup and replication of virtual machines.
"A lot of SMB companies have done a lot of virtualization" said Alturi. "You have different challenges backup and replication if you have to protect 30 or 40 servers than if you had only one server. This is primarily used for protection of virtual environments."
vContinuum has a wizard-based graphical user interface that allows the end user to perform application-aware protection and recovery on virtual machines (VMs). It also automates VM discovery, the creation of protection policies, operational recovery and failover and failback operations.
InMage also has added built-in support for application failover for vContinum.
Henry Baltazar, senior analyst for the storage and systems group of The 451 Group, said InMage has done a good job of simplifying the recovery process for SMBs.
"In terms of recovery, they have made it as simple as possible and automated as much as possible," he said. "They added a lot of server failover. They are doing synchronized server failure instead of singular failover."