DR Picks Up Steam

Today, startups Kashya and Sepaton said they'll combine Kashya's replication and continuous data protection (CDP) capabilities with Sepaton's virtual tape libraries (VTLs). (See Sepaton, Kashya Team.) The American Institute of Physics (AIP) is the first announced customer since the partnership.

Also today, Sybase announced its Mirror Activator business continuity software is available on Oracle databases. (See Sun Switches Gears.) Mirror Activator works with replication software to copy only the log of data that has changed, requiring less bandwidth and speeding the process.

Earlier this week, XOsoft launched WANSync 4.0, adding CDP support for Unix, support for 64-bit computing and Red Hat Linux, Blackberry Enterprise Server, and multi-server Internet Information Services (IIS). (See XOsoft Upgrades WANSync.) WANSync is host-based software that provides asynchronous replication on a WAN-linked replica server in order to transfer changes to application data as they occur.

Revivio said this week it will integrate IBM's Tivoli CDP for Files into its Continuous Protection System (CPS) enterprise CDP product, letting Revivio customers gather data from remote offices to which they can then apply CDP. (See Revivio Integrates IBM Tivoli CDP.)

StorageCraft Technology Corp. released ShadowProtect Server, which allows for bare-metal recovery of Windows systems. (See StorageCraft Protects Laptops.)

BakBone Software launched a Backup Application Plug-in Module (APM) to add high availability for open source database MySQL. (See BakBone Adds MySQL Plug-In.)

Service provider SANZ today revealed it received a $4 million business continuity contract for a company in the oil and gas industry. (See Sanz Plans $4M DR.)

Integrated Waste Management Department (IWMD) of Orange County, California, and steel product manufacturer Shiloh Industries joined the American Institute of Physics in revealing disaster recovery implementations. (See IWMD Picks Compellent and Shiloh Picks EqualLogic.)

Ormond Beach, Florida-based Emergency Communications Network, Inc. installed XOSoft 4.0 to keep the servers up for its CodeRed and ThunderCall emergency phone services. Code Red sends phone messages alerting residents in geographic areas of emergencies such as missing children or health risks, and ThunderCall delivers early severe weather warnings to subscribers. Both programs require maintaining up-to-date databases and the ability to call thousands of phone numbers per hour.

Senior developer Gary VanOpdorp says he switched from Double-Take to the new XOsoftHA version because of XOSoft's support for 64-bit Windows, better alerts, and more reliable performance."Our servers can't go down," he says. "If we had a failure, we'd go out of business. It would be in the paper. That's why we're triple redundant. Those calls have to go out."

Emergency Communications replicates data between servers in Orlando, Atlanta, and Newark, New Jersey, and VanOpdorp says he's looking to add another on the West Coast. He recently upgraded his Orlando server to 64-bit Windows, and he says Double-Take couldn't promise 64-bit support for another nine months.

"I'll implement XOsoft automatic failover and notification capabilities. I use a monitoring program to monitor servers and page an on-call person if something goes down. Double Take would lock up. I wouldn't know until I checked it, and I had to be constantly checking it. Problems are going to happen, and if they happen I want to know."

Melville, N.Y.-based AIP uses its Website to store information for a subscription-based research site. Director of online technology James Wonder says the site averages 120 hits per second, and downtime is critical. Wonder has been using Kashya for replication for two years. He added Sepaton to combine CDP with VTL and because Sepatons roadmap calls for letting customers clone between two libraries remotely.

AIP has a failover site in Garden City, N.Y., but will eventually move it out of state. But he’s more concerned with the local replication that he gets from CDP than remote replication.

“Most failures happen locally,” he says. “If a problem happens locally, I can roll back [with Kashya’s CDP]. Remote replication is great for a real big disaster, but local is probably more important than remote. Now I’m able to take that local copy, and mount it on a backup server while I’m still backing up using Sepaton.”