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InMage - Business Recovery InMage is the leading independent software vendor in developing and delivering comprehensive, disk-based and scalable business application recovery solutions that allow companies to meet stringent disaster recovery, eliminate the impacts of local backups, and manage application uptime to meet high availability requirements.

InMage DR Scout

InMage Scout is a software solution for application and data recovery that supports remote disaster recovery, local backup elimination, and application failover/failback at both remote and local sites. InMage Scout includes several software-based components, including CX software and data taps. CX software is designed to run on any Intel-based platform, while the data taps are filter drivers installed on servers that you want to protect. InMage Scout is flexible in the sense that it can be used to protect Windows, Linux, and Unix servers that use either DAS, NAS, or SAN storage. It can be configured to support either block-based or file-based replication, but because of the efficiencies associated with block-based replication, most of our customers use the product in that way. Any open systems storage subsystem types are supported, including SCSI, FC, and iSCSI. It supports protected server source(s) and recovery server target(s) that use heterogeneous storage and heterogeneous storage architectures (e.g. DAS to SAN, etc.).

Disaster Recovery Comprehensive and Scalable Disaster Recovery Solutions If you're basing your existing disaster recovery plans around tapes that you're shipping back and forth between your local sites and one or more offsite storage facilities, then you already know that using tapes for recovery leads to days' worth of data loss, recovery times that can take from days to weeks, and recovery reliability issues that (for whatever reason) mean you can't always get back the data you need. Asynchronous replication can be used to structure disaster recovery plans that eliminate tape handling, support recovery operations that allow you to recover from very recent data states (at most several minutes old), and shorten recovery time frames to minutes or hours. Replication uses disk as the recovery media, addressing recovery reliability problems associated with tapes and tape handling. Recovering data provides a foundation for disaster recovery, but not a comprehensive solution. Data is useless without applications up and running to use that data, and DR plans must cover both. If your application recovery plan is based on manual recovery efforts that require sophisticated administrative expertise, you are introducing risk into your recovery plans unnecessarily. By using automated application recovery (when full application recovery is required), you rely on tested processes that are proven reliable, that do not depend the skill of the administrator, and that will bring your applications back to life faster than complex, manual efforts. InMage leverages several foundation technologies, including continuous data protection (CDP), asynchronous replication over IP, application-specific failover/failback processes, and WAN optimization technologies to provide a comprehensive DR solution that covers both applications and data. Because of the way InMage captures data from applications being protected, may of our customers can replace multiple existing software footprints (backup agents) and products (conventional clustering), simplifying their existing environments while lowering CPU utilization, maintenance headaches and support costs. When InMage is set up purely as a DR solution, it streams changes in protected application data immediately to a local target (the InMage CX) and then from there immediately to a remote repository target (a server with attached disk storage). The InMage repository at this remote site is kept current with changes to production data at the local site(s), and when data recovery is required, allows administrators to immediately access the desired data, send it across the WAN back to the local site, where it is copied over to the production server that needs it. Many customers add a local repository target (again, a server with attached disk storage), using InMage's 1 to n replication capability to maintain the local repository as well as the remote one. The local repository supports even faster recovery capabilities since recoveries do not have to traverse the WAN when they're required. By maintaining two repositories, customers take advantage of faster recovery for the most common, object-level recovery requests, but have data available remotely for recovery as well if the primary site is destroyed or otherwise incapacitated by a catastrophic event. To support application recovery, InMage supports several options. InMage can restart any application service at any location where a repository exists. Productized recovery capabilities which prepare the selected AppShot (or recovery point), start the application and any related services, mount the AppShot, and then update AD and DNS entries are available for key enterprise applications, but can be enabled for literally any crash-tolerant application (an application which employs reliable logging or journaling). Customers can set up configurations that can perform the application failover/failback in several ways: *  * Primary site to remote site and back *  * Primary site to local site and back (a shared nothing alternative to conventional clustering products) *  * Primary site to either remote site or local site and back, depending on the nature of the disaster Eliminate Backups Continuous Backup: Experience a new Backup/Restore Paradigm You're backing up because you need to recover, not because you like doing backups. Backups are a pain. They take up your time, they impact business operations, and after all that effort, they don't even always support reliable recovery. There are two key problems with conventional backup. One is that conventional methods treat backups as a discrete operation, resulting in the "pig through the snake" problem. At a given time, you try to take all the changes since the last backup and push them through your network all at once. As your backups get bigger and your networks don't, you will eventually not be able to complete your daily backups in the available time frames. The second (and related) problem is that tape is still the predominant backup medium. Tape is a sequential access medium whose performance characteristics do not mesh well with the requirements of backups and frequent, object-level restores. InMage solves this problem in a way which eliminates backup as a discrete operation (hence no more "backup window" problem), allows you to meet the most stringent RPO/RTO requirements, and improves recovery reliability relative to tape at the same time. InMage leverages disk-based recovery, a design decision which gives us access to disk-based technologies like CDP and replication that can eliminate backup impacts while actually improving your recovery capabilities. Using CDP, we stream writes from production servers as they occur throughout the day to our disk-based repository, moving backup from an impactful, discrete operation to a continuous operation that generally imposes no noticeable impacts on the network. Data streams from each server are annotated with time stamps and other tags that mark business process points that are relevant for recovery as well as a number of other business operations (reporting, test, maintenance, etc.). When a disk-based copy of what the production data looked like at any point within that data stream is needed, an administrator can retroactively select that point, generate a disk-based copy, and mount it on any desired server. The creation of these images imposes no impact whatsoever on production servers, and allows administrative operations of all sorts which use copies of production data to be time-shifted to any convenient time, a capability that can help optimize operator productivity. Think what this means for backup. Since I can effectively create a disk-based copy of production data whenever I want, I can create the optimal disk copy to meet any recovery scenario. Do I want the latest data state so as to minimize data loss on recovery? Do I want the most recent application-consistent point in time (referred to in InMage parlance as an AppShot) to minimize recovery time? Am I recovering from a data corruption problem, in which case I may want the most recent known good data state prior to the corruption event? Do I want several disk-based images clustered around a given point in time to use for root cause analysis? InMage allows you to immediately create any of these recovery points without having to handle any tapes. InMage customers generally define a retention period of from several days to several weeks across which the data streams from each protected server will be retained. Administrators can retroactively create any data state within that retention period. Companies that do not retain backup data longer requirements) may be able to entirely dispense with tape handling, not only at centralized sites but also at remote office locations. InMage can be used to automate data protection operations at these sites, which means that manual processes are not required on a daily basis to maintain appropriate levels of protection. Even if companies do eventually want to dump data to tape, InMage offers significant benefits by front-ending existing backup infrastructure. Any existing backup software can be used to back up AppShots to tape without imposing any business impacts. A common scenario in our customers who do still want to eventually migrate data to tape is the following: they are able to move from a situation where they back up to tape daily to one where they back up to tape weekly or even monthly, retaining intervening data states in the InMage repository to support near term recovery requirements. Note that this repository can exist in the remote site, in the local site, or in both sites at once (a configuration which leverages InMage's 1 to n replication capability). When deploying InMage, you can potentially replace backup and other agents that reside on production servers for the purpose of giving an application access to that server's data. Backup agents sit on servers to administer backups, interact with applications to perform on-line backups, and support other functionality (like source-based data deduplication). Agents can impose significant server overhead, and can present maintenance challenges. Multiple agents can potentially be replaced with the InMage data tap, a lightweight filter driver, and any application-specific tasks such as backups, reporting, etc. can be performed from AppShots created by InMage. In this way, InMage can reduce the number of agents required (and their associated patch management, maintenance fees, etc.), backup and otherwise. When using InMage to shift backup operations off-host, you may designate a single, centralized server as the backup server, mounting AppShots on it to perform backups to tape. This server would still need a backup agent, but this approach will allow you to eliminate a large number of backup agents and their associated costs. Finally, the fact that all near term recoveries are coming from disk and do not require tape handling will have a very positive impact on recovery reliability. Recovering Apps Application Recovery: The Faster, Easier Way to Deploy & Recover Sometimes you need to recover just data, and sometimes you need to recover an entire application. The world's best replication and backup solutions just recover data, requiring separate products, tools, and activities to recover applications. Application recovery is defined as the process necessary to recover an application service, like Exchange or Oracle, when that service has failed (due to hardware, software, or network issues). Administrators will generally either do application recovery manually, which is a time-consuming, risky proposition that is very dependent upon the skill set of the administrator, or they will deploy some form of clustering technology. Clustering technologies can shorten recovery times and improve recovery reliability, but because they require the introduction of a separate product, they add to configuration complexity and cost. InMage is a high availability application suite that effectively manages requirements for any application recovery. High Availablity Solution Customized Automated Application Recovery Among products that support data recovery, InMage stands out as a high availability solution that supports automated application recovery capabilities that are tailored to specific application environments. When you buy InMage, you are getting a local CDP engine, combined with an asynchronous replication engine, which can manage application failover and failback either remotely or locally. This consolidated recovery platform can replace multiple existing products, synergistically combining related recovery operations, shortening application recovery times, improving application recovery reliability, and lowering costs. Our engineering group has taken a common recovery template and implemented the specific recovery processes that are required for key enterprise applications such as Microsoft Exchange, SQL, and SharePoint as well as Oracle, MySQL, Blackberry Server, and SAP. These recovery steps will create a selected recovery image, start the application and associated services, mount the selected recovery point, and update AD and DNS entries so that users can transparently access the recovered application service without realizing that it is being supported on a different server. These application recovery capabilities are tested by InMage for reliability, and are fully supported and documented. The recovery template can be used to automate application recovery operations for any crash-tolerant application, allowing InMage to manage high availability requirements for any application. For more information click on the Links above