Features - Storage Innovations:

STORACTIVE LiveServ: CONTINUOUS BACKUP, ZERO-LOSS RECOVERY

Storactive Inc, a leader in true real-time data protection technology, announced the availability of Storactive LiveServ, a disk-based backup and recovery software solution that provides continuous, zero-loss data protection for business-critical Microsoft Exchange e-mail servers. Complementary to IT organizations' existing backup processes, LiveServ overcomes the limitations of traditional tape-based backup products by eliminating backup windows and recovering recent data up to the moment of loss. This means companies may safely reverse the effects of virus attacks and benefit from the near-instant recovery of accidentally deleted mailbox data.

"Storactive LiveServ takes a new approach to data protection, combining the benefits of both scheduled backup and real-time replication, but adding capabilities that eliminate the vulnerabilities of both," said Bill North, research director of storage software at IDC. "For instance, LiveServ's ability to rapidly recover downed Exchange servers, while excluding corrupt log files, gives IT administrators the power to restore recent data up to the point of failure, regardless of the cause of failure. This goes beyond what traditionally has been thought possible and may spur organizations to explore new possibilities in protecting their critical e-mail server data."

Continuous Protection & Rapid Recovery

LiveServ employs real-time technology to automatically and continuously back up data as it is changed, thus eliminating windows of vulnerability between scheduled backups and ensuring protected data is always current. Its disk-to-disk backup enables fast, transparent protection and, unlike simple mirroring, LiveServ captures every version of every message, so that any version can be recovered.

LiveServ's exclusive point-of-failure rollback enables administrators to recover data up to the moment a loss occurred, even if Exchange's logs are corrupted or destroyed. This facilitates the complete reversal of the effects of viruses, human error, and hardware, software or system failures. What's more, recent data can be recovered up to the point of failure, while the server is up and running.

With LiveServ, administrators can quickly restore everything from a single e-mail message to an entire information store. LiveServ's brick-level recovery enables almost instant restoration of individual data objects (e-mail messages, contacts, etc.) while the server is running -- without creating temporary server or database configurations. In contrast, many traditional tape-based systems require hours to retrieve individual messages.

To minimize network traffic and storage capacity requirements, LiveServ eliminates redundancy at both the file and block level. This means only changed "zones" of data are backed up, and duplicate copies of e-mail attachments (which typically make up the bulk of e-mail storage) are collapsed even across multiple Exchange servers. This increases backup speed and transparency, allowing LiveServ to perform object-level backups for entire user groups continuously (taking no extra time), where it could take traditional backup systems many hours. LiveServ thus significantly improves data availability, supporting 24-7 operations with no need for server downtime.

"We designed LiveServ to work alongside existing backup systems or to be placed between a server farm and traditional backup server," said Tony Bautista, president and CEO of Storactive. "In either case, with the minimal investment of deploying a LiveServ server within an existing backup infrastructure, enterprises can add the significant advantages of continuous data protection and rapid brick-level restores while also increasing data security and business continuity."