Features - Storage Innovations:

StorageCraft VSnap IMPROVES SNAPSHOT PERFORMANCE

StorageCraft Inc, a leading supplier of innovative and high performance products and services for data storage, data protection, disaster recovery and backup, announced the immediate availability of VSS support for the VSnap product line. VSnap is the first true Microsoft Volume Shadow Copy Service (VSS) software provider.

This new release has much to offer both backup/disaster recovery software vendors as well as the enterprise consumers. VSnap significantly reduces the total cost of ownership for the enterprise wishing to have a premier backup/disaster recovery solution by offering its solutions for significantly less than competitors while providing a superior open file or snapshot solution. Vendors offering total solutions are enabled to include this high performance lower cost component thereby substantially reducing their overall solution cost.

By using the VSS framework to manage VSnap, improved file backups and volume images can be taken. VSS aware applications, such as Microsoft's Exchange Server 2003 and SQL Server 2003 will be notified of pending volume snapshots, allowing these applications to momentarily flush and hold their transactional data in a proper state for backup. Because it takes only seconds to capture a volume snapshot, these applications will be quickly released to continue processing data. Unlike conventional backups which can degrade an application's performance for long periods of time, a volume snapshot can be taken quickly and the application can then resume with little or no performance degradation. Backup of the system volume is also enhanced using the VSS framework. Many of the Windows XP and Windows 2003 system services are VSS aware. By using VSS to manage the snapshot on the system volume, the system will be backed up in a very consistent state.

VSnap is at the leading edge of open file backup technology. VSnap revolutionizes volume capture through its exclusive Volume Capture and Dynamic Store technologies. VSnap builds on the basic storage management framework of VSS and adds capabilities such as incremental "changed block" tracking, invisible store, support for systems with no NTFS volumes, hot volume restore and higher performance.

StorageCraft's VSnap is a software-based snapshot solution that leverages Microsoft's VSS for quick-recovery and high-performance backups and restores. Applications that are not VSS-aware may be backed up in an unsynchronized or "crash consistent" state. The resulting backup may not be fully coherent or complete; it may contain partial or incomplete transactions. Backup sets with partial or incomplete transactions do not meet the primary purpose of a backup. Only system-wide synchronization ensures data consistency across all applications during the backup process.

In addition to Windows XP and Windows Server 2003 VSS support, VSnap also supports legacy platforms to provide open-file/snapshot capabilities for systems not supporting Microsoft VSS such as Windows NT 4.0 and Windows 2000.