Moonwalk Adds Disaster Recovery

MILTON -- Moonwalk Inc., the Australian developer of all-inclusive data management and protection software, today introduced new disaster recovery features for its Moonwalk 6.0 software suite. Moonwalk software now delivers automated disaster recovery for migrated files in the event of a critical loss on primary storage. This builds upon Moonwalk's core capability for proactively managing the migration, copying and movement of data throughout the enterprise.

Moonwalk customers already appreciate the innovative way Moonwalk protects their data and reduces backup loads by automatically moving data from primary storage to lower-cost devices according to user-defined rules and policies. The new DR capabilities further enhance Moonwalk's standing as a powerful and all-inclusive data protection software suite through reducing risk, costs, complexity and IT resources by ensuring that the user will always be able to regain access to migrated files in the case of catastrophic failure of primary storage, or if the back end needs to bere-established in case of disaster.

Moonwalk's extremely small-footprint agents create a "stub" for each file.The stub and the migrated file have a unique relationship contained in the metadata, including age, size, location, file type, file name, file creator and even more granular classification criteria. When stubs are lost due to a failure in a server and/or primary storage, Moonwalk software reviews these metadata from the previously migrated set, and restores the stubs to a location according to the direction of the systems administrator. Moonwalks DR tools not only maintain the continuity and integrity of the migrated environment across the enterprise, but also as an extension, allow the user to rebuild or repurpose their front end or their back end if they are replacing outdated servers or storage.

The Stanford University Controller's Office had early access to this latest feature of Moonwalk technology as part of Moonwalk's Early Release Program.

"We've had a chance to work with Moonwalk DR for some time, and have used it to copy data from one machine to another and back again, which it does with very little user intervention. This has functioned so well for us that Moonwalk has largely replaced out tape backup systems for most of the restore functions," said Horace Greeley from the department's Information Systems Group. "We were particularly pleased that Moonwalk does not require an intermediate server or staging device. Removal of that point of failure from the data chain and uniquely identifying metadata in archived files has allowed us to immediately integrate Moonwalk's features in our disaster recovery and business continuity planning."Moonwalk Inc.