Storage start-ups spur rapid recovery

Storage start-ups Revivio and TimeSpring are readying software that lets users recover lost or corrupted data in minutes instead of hours or days.

When the products are introduced later this year, they'll join a growing market segment that emphasizes instant recovery of data and continuous protection, rather than data backup. Recently, two other start-ups, Vyant Technologies and FilesX, and established storage vendor Storagetek, launched products in this area.

"The devil's in the recovery when it comes to backup," says Bill Saba, director of IS for long-distance provider Startec Global Communications, who uses Vyant's recently introduced RealTime software. RealTime works on Solaris and AIX pla forms.

To continue reading, register here and become an Insider. You'll get free access to premium content from CIO, Computerworld, CSO, InfoWorld, and Network World. See more Insider content or sign in.

Storage start-ups Revivio and TimeSpring are readying software that lets users recover lost or corrupted data in minutes instead of hours or days.

When the products are introduced later this year, they'll join a growing market segment that emphasizes instant recovery of data and continuous protection, rather than data backup. Recently, two other start-ups, Vyant Technologies and FilesX, and established storage vendor Storagetek, launched products in this area.

"The devil's in the recovery when it comes to backup," says Bill Saba, director of IS for long-distance provider Startec Global Communications, who uses Vyant's recently introduced RealTime software. RealTime works on Solaris and AIX pla forms.

"Backup is a no-brainer. Recovering from a failure is a problematic step depending on what you've encountered," Saba says.

These software packages are much different than traditional backup and recovery, replication and snapshot tools, which are limited by the frequency with which a customer uses them to back up the network and by how quickly they can restore corrupted data.

In the systems from these five companies, all changes are recorded as they are written to disk and the time of the change noted. If a failure occurs, data can be retrieved from the closest minute, rather than from when the last scheduled full or incremental backup occurred.

"Anyone who is backing up to tape is looking at a lengthy recovery process," says Bob Passmore, research director at Gartner. "The time to mount a tape, search and find the right data, stream the data back in, [and] reboot the application is a process that can take from a few minutes to a couple of days. For applications that are up on the Internet being used 24 hours a day, the recovery requirements are more in seconds, not in minutes or hours a day."

When Startec initially migrated its business systems to an Oracle database, it had a problem that corrupted the control file and took two days to fix. The company installed RealTime.

"RealTime has a time-slide mechanism where you can go back and recover data from any point in time," Saba says. "When we lost an AIX file system, we knew exactly when it happened and recovered data in 15 minutes. All you have to determine is when the damage occurred and go back to just before it, and bring back data from that point."

Revivio's appliance, code-named Backtrac, attaches to existing host systems and storage devices via Fibre Channel. It monitors data continuously without taking down the database or network and time-stamps each disk write at the block level.

TimeSpring's product, TimeSpring Protector, will be formally launched late this year. Like Backtrac, TimeSpring Protector is installed on a server, called the Continuous Protection Server, which sits between network and the backup device. Agents are installed on protected servers. When data changes, it is continually stored to the Continuous Protection Server, from which it can be retrieved based on the corruption time. It works with direct-attached, network-attached and Fibre Channel storage and with Windows networks.