Remembering every instant in time

 

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Hal Weiss, senior systems engineer for Baptist Memorial Health Care, needed to save time and get at data faster. Using traditional back-up and recovery software, backing up two Windows servers supporting a business-critical application and image files was taking as many as 11 days.

That meant the Memphis, Tenn., healthcare system never really had a handy data source to restore from, Weiss says. Whenever Baptist needed to use the back-up resource, it had to run massive log file changes and do multiple restores, he explains.

After evaluating a variety of software, Weiss found just what he needed - a new form of backup and recovery called continuous data protection (CDP). Available from start-ups such as Mendocino Software, Revivio and Storactive, CDP products offer a time-sensitive approach to backing up and recovering data. With CDP, a record of every change to data is written to disk. This makes it possible for CDP software to return any application, database or file system to any previous point in time or process.

Using Revivio's Continuous Protection System (CPS) 1200, one of the first CDP products on the market along with Mendocino's RealTime, backups are now a breeze at Baptist. "Now I can literally restore the application and image files within seconds instead of days," says Weiss, adding that this saves IT staff time and the company money.

Now Weiss is testing out the CPS 1200 with a financial application that he must shut down before running a backup. "The only time we can do a backup on that system is at midnight when all the users are off the system," he says. "The application can be shut down and we can do a cold backup, so we only have a backup we can go to every 24 hours."

With CDP, Weiss could back up the application continuously and give users access to current information should the application fail. "Based on the testing we've been doing, we could actually get everything back up and running within 15 minutes," Weiss says.

In users' hands

Like Revivio's CPS, most CDP packages focus on recovering applications, databases and files and rely on the system administrator to recover users' client-side data. But Storactive's LiveBackup for PCs lets administrators or users recover lost files from Windows desktops or servers. Microsoft , too, will offer recovery by administrators or users when it ships its Data Protection Manager later this year.

The National Renewable Energy Laboratory (NREL) uses Storactive's CDP software to back up 600 desktop PCs at the Golden, Colo., organization. Previously, the lab used traditional back-up software - Veritas Software's Backup Exec - to protect these desktops. Because NREL is a governmental agency, users are required to change their passwords every three to six months. That meant that two to four times a year, the IT staff had to modify 600 scripts for scheduled desktop backups or the back-up operation wouldn't work, explains Todd Wessels, a systems engineer at the lab.