Business Continuity Server

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 Agent 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 Real-Time Event Journal.

- The BCS Real-Time Event Journal provides the central storage element of the platform. It receives and indexes the data sent to it from the agents; allows for the policy-based management of data history; and exposes a real-time object catalog to the Management Server.

- The BCS Management Server is the administration interface to the Real-Time Event Journal, sporting a browser-based management console. With it, the admin can display the real-time object catalog for management or data recovery. A key feature of the Management Server 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 (in the latest version of the product, this immediate recovery feature is also supported for SQL Server). Recovery sets can range from a single E-mail or file to a full server or data center.

BCS is available now, pricing starts at $19,000. Contact Asempra Technologies for further information.