Data Protection With Less HassleData Protection With Less Hassle

Most company information isn't protected in case of a disaster. The rut in the road for those companies doing something is the cost of a mirrored, online remote site that could double or triple the cost of their infrastructure.

Brokers and securities companies spend millions of dollars on remote mirroring because an hour of downtime could cost them more millions. But even they need to extend the distance between their remote sites to follow new government regulations. Into this fray step a handful of vendors, mostly startups, offering simpler, more efficient alternatives to the business-continuity infrastructures offered by EMC, IBM, and Hewlett-Packard. Revivio Inc., one of those startups, is introducing its offering on Monday and plans to ship its first appliances to select customers in August.

Revivio will connect an Intel 25-processor server appliance to a customer's network--and the customer won't have to change or remove anything it already operates. Time addressing inside the appliance will catch any changes to databases and files worked on during the day or night and put a time stamp on each change. The complexities of the TimeOS software that makes this happen are under the covers to the customer. If an outage occurs, a customer just needs to go back one minute from the time of the outage and it will have all the information restored.

Revivio's appliance will be limited only by the amount of disk-based storage each customer chooses. Each company will decide how long it needs online data to be retrievable; over time, customers could move the information to existing storage based on low-cost ATA-based disk or tape.

According to Revivio VP of marketing Kirby Wadsworth, who spent time at Digital and Compaq, an evaluation appliance will cost around $50,000 but the average production system will run about $1 million. He says that's nothing compared with the millions of dollars and mother lode of complexity that the best high-availability customers deal with today. "Nobody figured out how to access millions of data points at a specific time before," Wadsworth says. "The current products are clumsy, expensive, and they take too long."

Steve Duplessie, founder and industry analyst at Enterprise Storage Group, says Revivio will find competition from Storage Technology's EchoView, EMC's Centera content-addressable system, and startup, Avamar Technologies, though the latter requires customers to do away with current backup and recovery software. "Revivio is noninvasive and copies the information," he says. "In case of downtime, it's click, boom, provide the data in seconds."

Go to sidebar: SunGard Tests Revivio