Asigra Televaulting is a WAN-based backup and recovery platform, targeted especially to distributed Enterprise or service provider (to offer WAN-based backup services to their customers) deployments. The platform enables each remote or branch office (or small to medium sized business, in the case of service providers) to backup and restore their data to WAN-connected data center storage.

The product consists of two primary software components: The DS-Client, which resides at the branch/customer site; and the DS-System, which resides at the WAN-connected data center.

DS-Client provides for the gathering of backup data from the branch office nodes, which themselves can be driven by multiple operating systems, including Mac OS X, VMware, Windows NT/2000/XP/2003, NetWare, AIX, Solaris, HP-UX, HP-Tru64, iSeries OS-400, Red Hat Linux, and SuSE. An agentless platform, DS-Client collects information from the individual branch office nodes via direct login; i.e., when setting up the client, the administrator provides the necessary username/password combinations for connecting to the nodes.

Once the data is collected from the nodes, it is compressed, encrypted (up to 256-bit AES), and delivered over the WAN to the DS-System component that resides at the data center. Data is both transferred and stored in encrypted form such that only the customer is able to access the actual contents. The vendor states that DS-System supports DAS, NAS, or SAN storage; and a single deployment can support multiple customers (or branches) or a single customer (or branch) exclusively.

Key features of the platform include:

- A full once, incremental forever methodology in which a full backup is processed only once and incremental backups are processed thereafter

- Delta-blocking technology, in which only changed data blocks of files need be transmitted to the data center

- De-duplication technology such that new files that are found to be identical to files already backed up needn't be retransmitted to the data center (instead, a "stub" pointer is sent to reference the originally saved file)

- Support for hot backups of DBs (SQL Server, Oracle, DB2, MySQL, PostgreSQL) and support for the hot backup and restore of individual mailboxes or messages in Exchange Server & Outlook 2000/2003, Lotus Notes/Domino Server, and Groupwise

- Support for bare metal restores

- Support for Continuous Data Protection, wherein the DS-Client monitors the specified data source and whenever changes are detected, data is automatically backed up

- Support for Backup Lifecycle Management, via an Archiver module that enables customers to perform policy-based file archiving and management, including the creation of restorable point-in-time copies of backup sets for historical reference

- Support for local file restores (data can be stored locally on the DS-Client as well as sent over the WAN)

An example implementation of the Asigra Televaulting platform is the DataGuard Vault service from Imation. Imation offers this service primarily to SMBs and "Remote Offices, Branch Offices" (ROBOs); the DS-Client component resides on-site with the vendor managing the data center (DS-System) storage.

New features in the latest Televaulting release include support for the backup and recovery of VMware ESXi, support for multi-directional data center replication, and a grid-based deployment infrastructure that can be scaled independently for performance or capacity.

Asigra Televaulting is available now (pricing starts at $14,000); as is Imation's DataGuard Vault. Visit the vendors' Web sites for further information.