Continuous Backup: Experience a Revolution in the Backup/Restore Paradigm

Conventional backups are a discrete operation that takes all data changes since the last backup and tries to shove them through your network at one time. This approach leads to the "pig through the snake" phenomenon that causes negative impacts to business operations when backups are being performed, slowing application performance and taking up considerable network bandwidth. You only back up because you have to do that today to enable recovery, but what you really care about is recovery.

InMage Scout completely changes the conventional backup/restore paradigm in use today. New data is captured continuously, as it is created, effectively spreading the "backup" throughout the day. This approach takes up negligible bandwidth that imposes no impacts on production applications, while at the same time always enabling recoveries from the most recent data. InMage Scout doesn't shorten backups, it completely eliminates them as a discrete operation.

Continuous back up process

Administrators define a retention period for collected data, and InMage Scout will retain that amount of data using a rolling window. If the retention period is defined as 3 days, then InMage Scout will always have the most recent three days' worth of data. Our CDP technology allows administrators to retroactively select any recovery point within that retention period and immediately generate a disk-based copy of that recovery point. If that copy represents an application-consistent point in time (something that an administrator will know before they ever create it), it can be used to enable very rapid, reliable recoveries, but these AppShots (as well as any other crash-consistent recovery points that are selected) can be used for any number of other administrative operations. If you define your retention period to be 1 week, then instead of backing up to tape every day, you only back up to tape once a week, using data in the InMage repository to meet daily recovery requests faster and more reliably than tape ever could. Any backup operation you do is performed from an AppShot so that backup operations are now entirely off-loaded from any production server. One or more AppShots representing one or more previous points in time can be created whenever needed without ever impacting production operations.

We have customers that have defined retention periods to be several weeks, and because they do not need to keep older backup data around, have entirely dispensed with tape-based operations and all the manual involvement that goes along with it (tape handling, searching through tapes sequentially to find specific files, shipping tapes on trucks, etc.). We define backup data as distinct from DR data. If administrators do eventually want to migrate older DR data to tapes, this can be done from AppShots generated at remote sites so that production operations are completed insulated from these activities.

Given that InMage Scout moves backup operations off production servers, backup agents can be removed from them as well. Since AppShots are just disk-based application-consistent recovery points, they can be mounted on target servers and backed up to tape from them if you want to do that. That server would have to have a backup agent on it, but since AppShots reflecting data states from many servers can all be mounted on one or more target servers and backed up from there, you don't need backup agents on the production servers anymore. This frees up CPU on the production servers, lowers backup agent licensing costs, and removes any maintenance activities that would otherwise be associated with backup agents on production servers.