XOsofts Assured Recovery Speeds Disaster Recovery

This week, XOsoft Inc. will make available its Assured Recovery software, a new product that allows customers to perform fully automated scheduled tests of applications without disrupting an IT environment.

Capable of being integrated with existing backup tools, Assured Recovery features a pause functionality that helps eliminate the need to perform costly or time-consuming resynchronization by taking a snapshot of the database and collecting any changes made. XOsofts DataRewinder technology then brings the database and system back to its start point before synchronization.

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"The major problem of testing a remote server is, unless you bring this server up at specific times, you never can be sure that the database at the remote site is OK," said Leonid Shtilman, chairman and founder of XOsoft, based in Waltham, Mass.

Assured Recovery is currently available and is offered as a bundled product with XOsofts WANSync and WANSyncHA for Microsoft Corp. Exchange, Oracle Corp. and Microsoft SQL Server databases. WANSync is XOsofts core replication product. WANSyncHA adds push-button or automatic failover of clients from the production server to a secondary replication server without reconfiguring clients.

Shtilman said XOsoft is working with storage hardware vendors including EMC Corp. and Hitachi Data Systems to support Assured Recovery.

Sam Newberry, systems administrator for Indianapolis-based Indiana Lumbermens Mutual Insurance Co., has been running an early version of Assured Recovery in his Microsoft Windows 2003 and SQL Server environment for more than a month. He said the product allows him to conduct application testing on a great deal of in-house or off-the-shelf applications without affecting his organizations disaster recovery plan.

"We had all this wonderful hardware out there, and being ready for a disaster wasnt doing us any good," said Newberry. "For us to take down those [remote] systems over there for any length of time created a window of vulnerability during that testing phase because it would disrupt the replication itself."

Newberry, who performs disaster recovery testing quarterly, said Assured Recovery allows him to do extensive testing without creating huge windows of downtime.

"Once you start [application testing], you dont want to mess with it, especially if youre dealing with a 20- or 30GB database," Newberry said.

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