Application Recovery Program: The Faster, Easier Way to Deploy & Recover

Data protection vendors, whether they are backup software- or appliance-based, talk about data recovery. They offer approaches to shorten backup windows, back up more often, make recoveries easier, and generally offer options that use disk as recovery media to shorten recovery times and improve recovery reliability. Some of them have replication capabilities that can help improve DR capabilities, lowering the amount of data loss associated with remote recoveries and shortening recovery times.

What they don't talk about is application recovery. They'll help you recover your data, but once you've got it, you have to do something separate to get the applications that will use that data back up and running. You can use manual approaches, relying on sophisticated administrative resources to bring applications back up, or you can buy availability clustering software. Either way, you introduce significant complexity into application recovery that inserts risk and increases recovery times or introduces cost as well as adding yet another product that needs to be managed.

If you care about automated application recovery to shorten recovery times and reduce risk, it's good to know that InMage Scout includes application failover/failback capabilities that can be used with any application. This capability is included at no extra charge with our base product. It leverages a shared nothing cluster model, replication to get the data to the remote location, and provides for application-awareness that translates to faster, easier deployment and recovery capabilities tailored to a particular application environment. While these solutions are application-aware, they are not application-specific. We leverage a shared management foundation with InMage Scout that centralizes control and provides a common set of processes for capturing data, marking key recovery and business process points in the data stream for possible future reference, and performing recoveries that, underneath the covers, leverages application-specific install templates, APIs, and productized application failover/failback steps. Multiple application-aware solutions for key enterprise applications like Microsoft Exchange, SQL, and SharePoint, as well as Oracle, MySQL, Blackberry Server, and SAP can be run simultaneously on a single CX, but InMage Scout is not limited to just these applications: the same general processes can be used to provide automated failover/failback for any crash-tolerant application.

If you don't care about automating application recovery now, evolving business and regulatory mandates may require you to add that in the future, and with InMage Scout, it's good to know that it's there already, available to you when you want to deploy it. In the long run, a comprehensive recovery platform that consolidates recovery for applications and data, remotely or locally, provides a more complete, cost-effective solution than implementing the same capabilities using multiple products and/or some combination of manual recovery steps.