Just finished interviewing Steven Toole (chief marketing officer) and Joseph Hand (senior solutions architect) of AppAssure about their Best of TechEd award finalist, AppAssure Replay 4. Promising “the world’s fastest and easiest backup and disaster recovery” capabilities on the market, AppAssure certainly offers a bevy of game-changer features, including
- 15-minute recovery from any Windows application server failure
- 5-minute retrieval of any Exchange Server or SharePoint object
- a total elimination of backup windows and tape backup
- bare metal restore to similar or dissimilar hardware or virtual machine (VM) in minutes
- live access to applications (including email) instantly during a recovery
- a savings of 80 percent or more disk space with built-in data de-duplication and compression
Particularly impressive about Replay 4 is its evolution from file-based recovery to image-based recovery. Traditional backup products move files to an alternate storage medium such as tape. But what if you have to restore apps or whole servers? AppAssure wants to shatter that resource-heavy paradigm by leaving tape behind and focusing on an agent-based approach that captures an initial image of a server and then takes incremental snapshots. You might set up a 15-minute interval, collect those into a collapsed 1-day interval, and then into a 1-week interval, and so on into months and a year, until that history can be embedded into a base image. You’re getting near-continuous backups in real time—so, say goodbye to the traditional notion of backup jobs.
What about restoring individual files from a live restoration task? Perhaps you need to find a single message in Exchange Server. AppAssure likens its process to the “lost wallet” scenario, by asking, “Well, where did you see it last?” Replay 4 lets you reach across an intensive restore job and quickly access the exact file you need, locally or remotely.
Perhaps Replay’s greatest asset is that it’s a single solution in a market that typically requires hobbled-together solutions from various sources. With its laser focus on usability, and its comprehensiveness in a fractured market, AppAssure is getting a lot of deserved attention. “Our solution stops the phone from ringing,” said Hand proudly. Check out the 60-some case studies on the company website to see how Replay 4 might benefit you.
