Start-up targets application recovery

Start-up Illuminator last week introduced software designed to help companies better protect their applications.

Restore-Illuminator, which the company introduced at the Storage Decisions conference in New York, runs a discovery process on the network for applications and the equipment on which they run. IT managers then can set rules for the applications they want to protect.

"The company's software goes out into the applications being protected and examines what data objects are aligned with what storage objects to ensure that the application can actually be recovered," says Brad O'Neill, senior analyst for the Taneja Group. "It identifies gaps between the application and storage stack, then lets administrators resolve those gaps."

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Start-up Illuminator last week introduced software designed to help companies better protect their applications.

Restore-Illuminator, which the company introduced at the Storage Decisions conference in New York, runs a discovery process on the network for applications and the equipment on which they run. IT managers then can set rules for the applications they want to protect.

"The company's software goes out into the applications being protected and examines what data objects are aligned with what storage objects to ensure that the application can actually be recovered," says Brad O'Neill, senior analyst for the Taneja Group. "It identifies gaps between the application and storage stack, then lets administrators resolve those gaps."

O'Neill says Restore-Illuminator is an example of the applications and storage integrations that more vendors are expected to introduce over the next year or so.

"Successful backup is only one component of a successful recovery," says Yoav Boaz, CEO and co-founder of Illuminator. "IT doesn't really know what they don't know. They protect the applications and the infrastructure they know about, but if there is an application they don't know about, they are not protecting it."

Out of the box, the software will discover Oracle, Microsoft Exchange and IBM Rational ClearCase programs, though an API is available to support other applications.

A cursory look at Restore-Illuminator would have it competing with backup-reporting software from Bocada and WysDM. These tools, however, tell an administrator only which servers and file systems are being backed up. Illuminator differs in that it looks at the backups from an application viewpoint.

Restore-Illuminator runs on a Windows server or workstation and works with back-up systems running on Windows, Linux or Unix networks. The company says it will discover and report on NetWare backups next year. Restore-Illuminator also works with EMC Legato Networker, IBM Tivoli Storage Manager and Symantec Veritas NetBackup. The product will discover applications on servers, storage-area networks and network-attached storage devices from Network Appliance and EMC.

The company, which is funded for $9 million by Greylock and Evergreen Partners, was founded in April 2004 by Boaz and Rami Katz, vice president of research and development. Boaz had sold a previous product called Backup Operations Manager to Legato, an EMC company.

Restore-Illuminator starts at $40,000 to $60,000, depending on the number of servers and storage devices in the network.

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