Business Continuity - Continuous Data Protection.

InMage DR Scout - CDP and DR logo

DR Scout Overview - Continuous Data Protection

DR-Scout suite brings business continuity to a whole new level, combining enterprise-class disaster recovery - and the world's most advanced continuous data protection (CDP) - in a single product. Whether you are concerned about email, databases or unstructured files, DR-Scout is ideally suited for implementing consolidated remote replication and continuous backup based on CDP technology.

DR-Scout is built for both medium and large enterprises, scaling to cover all the production servers, applications, platforms and storage systems that make up your business. Its built-in advanced continuous data protection features mean that recovery is quick and easy. DR-Scout CX is the only product on the market to deliver consistent, fine-grained event recovery at any location, at any time, within any storage environment. This ability to go back to a business event allows unprecedented compliance with regulatory requirements. DR-Scout was engineered from day one to solve end-user pain in implementing disaster recovery, WAN optimisation, Windows application failover and continuous data protection.

The innovative approach brings the benefits of host-based software without the drawbacks. By using a light-weight volume replication agent on the application server and then sending the data to an out-of-band network-based appliance that does all the heavy-lifting such as compression, encryption and management, DR-Scout avoids the traditional performance problems yet provides superior data recovery capabilities.

Features & Benefits

Single Solution for DR and Continuous Data Protection

DR-Scout is a single, integrated solution for both data replication and continuous backup or continuous data protection, performing data replication for both volume-based structured data and file-based structured and unstructured data. This means it can provide disaster recovery, sending files and volumes over the WAN to long-term storage and continuous data protection, with local storage for Recovery Time Objectives (RTO) or Recovery Point Objectives (RPO).

DR-Scout avoids the problems of traditional array-based approaches; which are very costly and tied to a proprietary, inflexible architecture. It also avoids the problems associated with host-based approaches that limit performance with the overhead of server-based software that consumes CPU cycles.

DR-Scout brings the benefits of the host-based approach while avoiding its disadvantages. A small volume or file replication agent runs on the application server, but sends the data to an out-of-band application that does all the compression and encryption. In this way DR-Scout avoids the traditional performance problems while providing superior data recovery capabilities

Application Integration

DR-Scout has built-in integration with applications such as databases (SQL, Oracle), email servers (Exchange) and file servers. DR-Scout also enables synchronised data protection of multi-server applications such as ERP installations.

Event Driven Restores

DR-Scout allows you to insert Business Event Bookmarks into the change data stream, and use them for fast recovery point selection. This allows organisations to meet even the most aggressive RTO and RPO goals, while easily demonstrating compliance with regulatory requirements.

How It Works

The DR-Scout architecture is based on a set of fundamental design principles that provide for efficient, highly-scalable processing in the most demanding environments. Key design principles include:

Support for near-zero RPO and RTO requirements
Support for heterogeneous storage infrastructure (DAS, SAN and NAS) and host operating systems
Integrated and comprehensive support for Near-Line and Disaster Recovery protection policies
Elimination of backup windows
Extremely low impact to production environments compared to other vendors' approaches
Optimisation of secondary storage use, to provide fastest recovery without any additional compression or loss of performance
Leveraging of existing network infrastructure
Usage of low-cost TCP/IP-based transport for remote replication
Scalability to handle the needs of today's distributed environment
Centralised management of local and remote data protection policies

The suite comprises two types of components: host-agents and control servers. Host Agents include DR-Scout VX for volume-level continuous data protection and DR-Scout FX for scheduled file-level protection. Each has a small footprint on the host, and only moves byte-level differences based on data changes. DR-Scout CX is the Control and Media Server that provides for centralized management and offload of CPU-intensive operations necessary for efficient data protection. It includes a CDP/DR modeller to help IT accurately provision secondary disk storage and bandwidth. The diagram above shows a typical deployment of DR-Scout in an enterprise data centre, providing quick operational restore via continuous data protection for outages of even one day or more, and efficient bandwidth utilisation for longer-term Disaster Recovery and Remote Replication to a secondary site.

Advanced Disaster Recovery with Virtualised Servers

InMage delivers enterprise-class disaster recovery and high availability solutions for virtual environments. DR-Scout works with a virtualised source, target, or both. This means that you can protect physical servers as well as use a virtualised server as the replica target on the DR site. InMage DR-Scout also provides continuous data protection for virtualised server environments, meaning that VMware servers can be protected with very short RPO/RTO times. The result is a very high level of application protection and availability - at a much lower total cost of ownership.

DR-Scout for Server Virtualisation provides local and/or long-distance protection against almost any outage, whether from something as simple as a failed power supply to a complex regional disaster. With DR-Scout, you can replicate to a disaster recovery site as far away from your production server as you wish, over standard IP networks. This means maximum protection against data loss from local or regional disasters. Best of all, DR-Scout supports all leading virtual technologies, including VMware ESX and Server, Microsoft Virtual Servers, and more.