Breaking the addiction to large storage vendors

Covering storage sometimes reminds me of browsing the Internet: Occasionally you may reach an apparent dead-end, but you are always far from having walked into every corner.

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One of the reasons for this virtually infinite dimension of storage is obviously the number and variety of vendors. It’s got to be in the hundreds, but I haven’t seen an accurate census of storage vendors yet. And the large majority of those vendors are often small companies that don’t have the large coffers and the booming marketing voice of the few big guys.

The result is that customers hear mostly about what the few large vendors have to offer, which is a pity because often, the most interesting new technologies and the most innovative solutions are proposed by the small players in this industry. 

In that vein, I’m taking this opportunity to point the Storage Insider spotlight on two well-established vendors of data protection solution for SMBs: Revinetix and Yosemite.

I’ll start with Yosemite Technologies, a company that you probably already know for its multiplatform backup application. Yosemite is not saying how much it paid for it, but the recent acquisition of FileKeeper CDP (continuous data protection) adds a very complementary product to its portfolio.

Describing how FileKeeper CDP works is easy: You install a local agent on each protected machine. The agent intercepts and locally replicates new files and changes to existing files. When the laptop is connected to a network, those changes will automatically flow to a dedicated shared directory.

An administrator can set up policies to define how to use the system, but within those rules, users can retrieve a previous version of a file without any outside assistance from the familiar context menu of Windows Explorer.

FileKeeper CDP currently supports only Windows laptops and desktops, and its unclear at the moment if it will expand in the future to other platforms or to a server environment. For now, FileKeeper CDP works independently from Yosemite backup application. You can try it out free for 30 days, too.

For many small businesses, protecting their data with vulnerable combinations such as a backup application plus a tape library just doesn’t cut it. What if you need frequent fast restores? How can you manage seamless replicas to multiple sites? How can you implement ironclad data protection without a small army of technicians?

Because of that, some SMBs found that Revinetix backup appliances were easier to implement and less expensive than other data protection alternatives. Revinetix offers desktop and rack-mountable appliances with various capacities, but they all have a common OS, the RevOS, and the ability to create a second copy of backup data on a removable drive for archiving.

From the Revinetix management console, you see how the seven drives of this 2U appliance form a volume in RAID5 configuration to receive backups, while the last drive stores redundant copies and can be removed and sent to an offline vault. Large capacity SATA drives work well with large backup data.

In addition, the RevOS can automatically span archiving over multiple drives. To build a catalog of archived files, Revinetix captures the unique serial number that identifies any disk drive.

The Revinetix appliance works with a variety of client OSes, and its use of an agent maintains a constant check on the connectivity status. From the browser based management console, an admin can also search and restore files to their original location or another spot.

An important difference between Revinetix and other backup solutions is that Revinetix will automatically combine any number of incremental backups to present the most up-to-date version of a file. That’s a feature that obviously saves time and possible headaches.

Perhaps the most important new feature in the recently-announced RevOS 2.0 is the ability to support granular backups and restores of Microsoft Exchange servers down to the single message. While this and other new RevOS 2.0 features (such as the ability to use part of the appliance space as a NAS repository) are available immediately, Revinetix is working on other interesting improvements. Continuous data protection and a native Microsoft SQL server agent that should be part of future releases — keep your eyes peeled. 

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