E-Mail Archiving, Backup Come to the Fore at SNW

Several products focusing on backup and e-mail were announced on Tuesday at Storage Networking World in Phoenix.

ADIC (Advanced Digital Information Corp.) of Redmond, Wash., introduced the Pathlight VX 450, a solution that provides midrange data centers with disk backup, including integrated tape support, for critical data.

The solution allows midrange companies to avoid the choice between backing up their entire data sets daily or using more costly enterprise disk-based virtual library solutions, according to Bill Britts, executive vice president of sales and marketing.

Although the Pathlight VX 450 looks like a tape library to backup applications, it creates tapes for export under backup software control, without impacting backup of application server performance, Britts said.

The product, which provides 4.2TB of usable disk capacity and 0.5TB-per-hour throughput, also presents disks as a virtual tape library to applications, allowing it to fit into existing backup and restore processes originally designed around automated tape libraries.

The product also exports media under full backup software control in native application format and includes features like high-capacity import/export support, integrated partitioning, I/O management and automated diagnostics.

Asigra Inc. of Toronto, Ontario, also introduced a backup solution—the agentless MLR (Message Level Restore), which protects and restores individual or group e-mails for Microsoft Exchange, Microsoft Outlook, Lotus Notes/Domino and Novell GroupWise.

Using the MLR modules selective filtering, users can back and restore individual mailboxes and email messages for one user or an entire network instead of restoring entire Exchange, Domino or GroupWise databases, said Eran Farajun, executive vice president of Asigra.

The MLR function also allows users to restore lost, damaged or corrupted messages, while Asigra Televaulting for Enterprises allows for bare-metal restores. Asigras CFE (Common-File-Elimination) capability helps optimize data within and across remote sites, reducing the amount of data to be transmitted for backup to the central site by identifying and isolating files and blocks for de-duplication, Farajun said.

On the e-mail archiving front, StorServer Inc. of Colorado Springs, Colo. announced a partnership with NorthSeas AMT of Ottawa to provide an e-mail archiving and storage solution for SMBs (small and midsized businesses). The product combines StorServers appliance for backup, archive and disaster recovery with NorthSeas e-mail archiving technology.

The combined technologies allow organizations to automate the processes that determine how to store and when to delete e-mails by offloading much of the mail servers storage responsibilities and storing a single copy of messages and their attachments addressed to multiple recipients, said William Smoldt, senior vice president of StorServer.

The appliance, now enhanced with e-mail archiving capabilities, can also serve as a corporate message repository that captures messages and can search, list, view and retrieve messages in an inbox using an existing messaging system, Smoldt said.

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