Syncsort BEX 3.1 Briefing Report
Joseph Ortiz, Senior Analyst
Everyone is familiar with the old saying that “Time is money”. This is especially true in the IT department of just about any business today. They are required to provide almost continuous and near-instant access to any data the company has generated in the past or that it will generate in the future. With exponentially increasing amounts of data to protect and track combined with shrinking backup windows, it becomes more and more challenging to meet ever tighter Recovery Time Objectives (RTO) with a greater number of recovery points, also know as Recovery Point Objectives (RPO), while still managing to contain costs.
Business continuance is critical to a company’s survival today and requires a robust, scalable and flexible data protection solution that can provide near CDP (Continuous Data Protection) combined with near-instant recovery capabilities for almost any size data set while helping to contain or reduce storage and operational costs.
BEX 3.1 from Syncsort is just such a solution that can scale from the SMB (Small to Medium size Business) to the Enterprise, while providing extremely fast backup and recovery capabilities combined with a comprehensive feature set, all of which is managed through a single elegant and intuitive management interface. Its holistic approach to data protection addresses key business concerns such as:
Wednesday, June 24, 2009
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•Business continuity
•Disaster recovery (as fast and simple as possible)
•Protection of central and remote sites
•Containing server and storage costs
•Streamlining management of the data protection and recovery processes
•Consolidating and optimizing the IT infrastructure
•Increasing productivity and efficiency
Syncsort’s BEX 3.1 addresses these concerns with an innovative architecture that provides variety of features such as:
•Client-side Data reduction
•Replication
•Disk to disk to tape archiving
•Data Migration
•Flexible Backup and Recovery methods
•Disaster Recovery
•Server Imaging
•Server Virtualization
•VMware VCB
•Exchange Backup and Recovery (including mailbox and message level)
•SharePoint Object Recovery
•Universal Reporting
•Zero impact backups (with data reduction)
•Multi-purpose snapshots
•Unified Platform, Console and Catalog
In terms of business value BEX 3.1 delivers high performance backups, instant recovery, ease of administration, and substantial data reduction with broad platform support. Servers can be backed up in minutes and recovered within one or two minutes. Applications such as Oracle can be cloned from backup snapshots without data transfers and servers can be virtualized almost instantly. This enables recovery of servers and sites in minutes rather than hours or days.
The data reduction feature can significantly reduce storage requirements and network data transfers by as much as 95% while having a zero impact on application performance.
It also supports a wide range of storage vendors’ devices, protocols, OSs such as Windows, Linux, Solaris and NetWare, heterogeneous applications and compliance/tape archiving. All of these things help lower the Total Cost of Ownership (TCO).
BEX 3.1 is able to provide fast backups and recoveries through their implementation of snapshot technology. While many other vendors also provide reliable, fast backups and recoveries through the use of snapshots, the Syncsort solution manages to hide the complexity often encountered in using and managing snapshot technologies from various different vendors and appliances. Setting up the snapshots and managing them is a simple point and click operation with the BEX 3.1 management console.
The data for these snapshots is read directly from disk, bypassing the file system, and used to create block level incremental backups that consist of a full base backup followed by changed block incrementals from that point forward. Only the blocks containing changed data are transmitted to the BEX Advanced Server, which means there is very little impact on the client server and the network. Additionally the BEX Advanced Client agent integrates with major applications like Exchange, SQL, Oracle, etc., to quiesce the application at the time of the snapshot and then restores it to normal operations. This also handles open files and effectively eliminates the need for weekly full backups.
The BEX Advanced Server processes and stores all of these snapshots, creating a new full image after each snapshot. This allows for much more frequent protection operations. These snapshots can also be automatically copied or migrated to other storage devices including tape, and they can be replicated to remote DR sites. BEX also maintains a map of the file system, which makes it possible to browse and recover individual files from the snapshots. The administrator can define policies that set the same or different retention periods for both disk and tape, along with automatic migration of the data from disk to tape.
These multi-purpose snapshots can be used for recovery of files, applications, virtual machines and Bare Metal Recovery (BMR). They are read/write mountable thus providing instant availability or instant virtualization. They can also be used for server migration and provisioning as well as database cloning, storage recovery and site recovery.
Recoveries can be executed quickly and easily without any concern as to whether the data being restored is currently on disk or tape. BEX handles that automatically based on the version and restoration criteria set by the administrator relative to the current location of the required data. All of this is done with simple point and click operations through the management console interface. The restore is executed in a single step back to the original or an alternate location. Recoveries can be done at the file, application, server (physical and virtual), and site level.
BEX also retains the ability to execute traditional file system backups for times when they may be preferable to image backups. One example would be when there is a need to apply different retention policies to different directory structures that resided on the same disk.
Applications such as SQL, Exchange, Oracle and SharePoint can be restored within a minute with no data movement. The administrator simply selects the desired recovery point and maps the server to the selected snapshot via the BEX management console. The data is once again live and the application is processing operations from the BEX Advanced Server. The changed blocks are tracked, and once the original hardware is replaced or repaired the changes can be synchronized back to the original application disk and resume normal operations.
BEX also provides extensive support for Exchange. You can recover the entire database, single mailboxes, individual folders, messages and attachments from the snapshots. This data can be restored to the original location or it can be restored to a different machine even if it is not running Exchange. Then individual items can be dragged and dropped to the production Exchange server. Similarly, for SharePoint, BEX provides object level restores.
BEX offers BMR capabilities that allow recovery of an entire server within minutes rather than hours or days. This is accomplished by inserting a bootable Syncsort CD in the new or repaired machine, then connecting to the BEX Advanced Server. The user then selects the desired recovery point and the server image is restored to the machine. Once the restore completes, reboot the machine and bring it back online. The entire process takes less than an hour.
Site recoveries can be done under an hour by using data and server images that were replicated to a remote DR site. You can recover these images to virtual machines or new hardware even if it is dissimilar. Part of the recovery process allows you to inject any necessary new drivers as part of the recovery process to the new hardware.
Additionally, and very importantly, BEX provides exceptionally strong support for VMs (Virtual Machines) and allows P2V, V2P, V2V and P2P restores. This support will be explored in more depth in a future article in order to provide proper coverage of this important feature.
The management console GUI is intuitive and makes managing schedules, policies, backups, recoveries, media servers and devices, a straightforward process. BEX includes an Advanced Find capability, which provides powerful search capabilities across all mailboxes, using keywords or other criteria.
Universal reporting allows you to see at a glance, the status of backups for all systems along with various details about the different backup jobs, errors encountered, etc. The 3.1 version also provides in depth reporting on VM backups and a variety of statistical information storage allocation, overall performance, data stores, etc. for both physical and virtual environments.
Syncsort has produced an Enterprise class product that provides a comprehensive solution, which gives users very high performance, instant recoveries, significant data reduction, broad platform support and that is easy to administer. It also provides state of the art support for virtual environments. Businesses contemplating changing or upgrading their current backup solution should give BEX 3.1 a close look.
