The flagship offering from Asempra Technologies, the Business Continuity Server (BCS) provides transaction-aware continuous data protection and recovery capabilities for the Windows Enterprise. The BCS works using existing iSCSI or Fiber Channel storage (SAN or direct attached) and communicates with targeted host computers via standard TCP/IP (LAN/WAN) communications.

The BCS consists of three primary components:

- The BCS Continuous Protection Driver (CPD) is a software client that is installed on the actual machines that host the application to be protected. The vendor notes that their platform supports Microsoft Exchange, Windows file servers, and SQL database applications. The client itself is transaction aware, capturing all events that update data and sending real-time events, metadata, and delta strings to the centralized Continuous Object Store.

- The Continuous Object Store (COS) provides the central storage element of the platform. It receives and indexes the data sent to it from the CPD; allows for the policy-based management of data history; and exposes a real-time object catalog to the Gateway.

- The BCS Gateway is the administration interface to the COS, sporting a browser-based (IE 6/7) management console. With it, the admin can display the real-time object catalog for management or data recovery (according to the vendor, the transaction-based nature of the platform allows for recovery of data--from a single E-mail to a full data set, regardless of size--in seconds or minutes). A key feature of the Gateway GUI is a time-line based data navigation system; to recover data one drags a timeline indicator to the targeted point-in-time (to the second), and selects the object to recover.

According to the vendor, the transaction protection process is transparent and I/O transactions are protected at the byte level. Real-time and object-based recovery of data are supported; the result of the product's continuous transaction-based capture of data, metadata, and events combined with its "Virtual On-Demand Recovery" technology that enables the target application (that is receiving the recovered data) to be restarted immediately and to be accessible while the selected data object(s) is/are being recovered. Recovery sets can range from a single E-mail or file to a full server or data center.

Other features include support for clustered (up to 4 nodes) deployments; support for the protection of MS Clustered applications (active/passive and active/active deployments); support for VMware-based Windows apps; support for variable data retention policies; and a CIFS-based interface enabling access to the data stores by 3rd party tape-based archiving products.

New features in the latest release include:

- Support for thin provisioning of BCS connected storage from a shared, central storage pool (with support for the addition of storage in the background)

- Support for storage multi-pathing

- Support for in-file deduplication (byte-level delta differentials)

- Extended support for third party storage platforms; including Storvault, Lefthand Networks, and HP All-in-One (iSCSI) and CA ARCserve

BCS is available now; pricing starts at $15,000 (includes server-appliance hardware).

Contact Asempra Technologies for further information.

product submission by EITPlanet Staff

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