By Jerome M. Wendt, President & Lead Analyst of DCIG Inc.

Replication software is increasingly entering the conversation as the logical replacement for backup software in client environments. Yet replicating data is really the easy part. Integrating the replication software so it becomes part of the fabric of a company’s infrastructure is a far more difficult task. It is also one of the reasons that replication software has, to date, made so little headway in terms of displacing backup software for enterprise wide data protection. But as replication software matures, that will change.

I recently had a chance to speak with Peter O'Brien, InMage Systems Vice President of Business Development, about what features he now sees are driving the adoption of InMage Systems’ DR-Scout in customer accounts. While DR-Scout continues to have success as a business continuity solution, he sees more companies starting to use it to address other immediate business needs that they have. For instance, one company recently started to use DR-Scout to measure and forecast data change rates in its environment.

But displacing backup software with replication software on servers is becoming the new end game for replication software. Replication software will never completely replace backup software as backup software is still needed to manage tape drives and tape libraries as well as the tape cartridges themselves. However replication software is certainly becoming a more viable option to displace backup software on the servers as more environments move towards disk as a backup target. Further, more organizations need near-zero backup windows and faster recovery times which are features that replication software, not backup software, is better equipped to provide.

So why have companies not adopted replication software already? The answer is simple according to O’Brien. Most replication software does not provide enough other functionality that organizations need to justify its wide-scale implementation. Features that he sees as replication software needing to do a better job of providing are the support of data movement, data migrations, and greater application extensibility.

He notes that replication software received a big boost over the last few years with the introduction of continuous data protection (CDP) technology that tracks most or all changes to production data. But CDP alone has not been enough to push replication over the top. Backup software has decades of technology behind it, a management interface and policies that administrators are accustomed to using and deep integration with the many applications that it protects.

The other issue is that as organizational data stores continue to grow, administrators need simple and effective ways to migrate and move this data locally and remotely. Pure replication software may or may not handle this task very well or, if it does, it only moves or migrates for one server or one application, not every server in the enterprise. As a result, it is really not suitable for wide scale deployment.

But a number of things have changed in the last few years that now make replication software products like DR-Scout viable for enterprise wide deployments including:

• Improved data movement and migration capabilities. DR-Scout can move and migrate data between different storage platforms so organizations can recover data locally or remotely.


• It has application level plug-ins. This means that as replication occurs, DR-Scout prompts the applications to flush their buffers and create consistent recovery points. These consistent recovery points can be used for remote recoveries or even as a source for off-host backups.


• It can manage multiple replication jobs from a central console. DR-Scout does not require administrators to log onto a specific console on each server in a replication pair. Rather it can manage replication and recovery for all servers performing replication from a central console which is needed for enterprise deployments.

For a deep dive into DR-Scout, listen to our Special Topics Webinar: “How to Eliminate Backup Window and Tape for Exchange, SQL, and Windows File Servers,” presented by Randy Weis, GreenPages Senior Solution Architect, and InMage. View Webcast › › ›

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