Asempra Makes Virtual Move

Startup Asempra is about to join the list of CDP vendors bolstering their virtualization strategies, announcing support for VMware and 64-bit hardware next week. (See Asempra Names CEO and Asempra Exchanges CEOs.)

The vendor will take the wraps off its Business Continuity Server (BCS) 2.5 solution, which is one of a growing number of bulked-up CDP offerings from vendors like Mendocino, EMC, and FalconStor. (See CDP Gets Broad Makeover, CDP + Replication = DR, Calix Wins Canadian Deals, EMC Coughs Up for Kashya, and FalconStor Launches SIR.)

CIOs and IT managers have already urged vendors to increase their efforts around CDP, which monitors write- and log-I/Os with timestamps to enable recovery from any point in time. (See Users Push for CDP Shapeshift .)

Increasingly, users are also looking to protect their virtual infrastructures. (See VMware: The Charging Bellwether and VMware Stirs Virtual Controversy.) "The reason we added VMware support is that virtualization has become such a common technology," says Eric Herzog, Asempra's vice president of marketing. "We were getting customer requests for running VMware on servers and they needed to protect that data."

Asempra is not the only vendor on this tear. Earlier this week, for example, fellow startup InMage overhauled its DR-Scout CDP solution, adding support for VMware, Microsoft Exchange Server 2007, and 64-bit processors. (See InMage Upgrades DR-Scout.)Like InMage, Asempra will also announce support for 64-bit processors next week. Herzog told Byte and Switch that this will increase the solution's clustering capacity from 256 Tbytes to 32 Pbytes.

Unlike most of the other vendors in this space, Asempra is focused firmly on mid-sized companies, and it deals solely with Windows-based applications. Herzog says the startup has no plans to extend beyond Windows right now, although he confirmed that support for Exchange Server 2007 will be added later this year. Currently, Asempra supports Exchange Server 2003.

The vendor is also touting a software feature it describes as Virtual On-Demand Recovery, which it claims can guarantee that an application's data is available for use within minutes, or even seconds, of a recovery. Herzog says the startup has four or five beta sites using BCS 2.5, although he was unable to serve up any of these customers for Byte & Switch to speak to this week.

Enterprise Strategy Group (ESG) analyst Lauren Whitehouse feels that CDP and replication are nonetheless a good fit for virtualized data centers. "There's a lot of benefits for companies using virtualized servers to set up a disaster recovery scenario," she says. "You can have multiple physical systems failover to a single physical server running multiple virtual machines."

One user that has deployed both virtualization and CDP is Salt Lake City, Utah-based pharmacy chain WorkingRx, which has deployed InMage's DR-Scout. "We can protect physical as well as virtual data," says Luke Saban, the WorkingRx CFO, adding that he is using the solution to protect his firm's core financial reporting package.WorkingRx spent around $134,000 deploying the InMage solution to support a total of four applications. "Although the price tag was a bit pricey, they have allowed us to save a ton of money," says Saban, adding that the other option was to deploy a $300,000 high-end virtualization device from DataCore. (See Volkswagen Protects With DataCore, Chapel Deploys DataCore, and All Medical Uses DataCore.)

The exec, who is planning to shift his infrastructure from a Windows to a Linux environment next year, told Byte and Switch that Asempra was not one of the vendors considered when he deployed InMage earlier this year.

Pricing for Asempra's BCS 2.5, which is available at the end of June, starts at $15,000.

James Rogers, Senior Editor Byte and Switch