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Originally published at Internet.comThe flagship offering from Illuminator Inc., the Illuminator Virtual Recovery Engine is billed as an "application-aware" recovery management platform. Its key functionality is the continuous monitoring of existing servers, file systems, databases, and applications; it examines the applications, data stores, and existing recovery processes and highlights those apps that are potentially not being properly protected by their data backups.
The platform is agentless, and is able, according to the vendor, to automatically discover servers, DBs, file systems, application instances, and data protection processes (including snapshots, replication, CDP, backups, etc. and their underlying NAS/SAN infrastructure). Such information is gathered into a central repository, where the product's correlation engine can then mine the data and identify "at-risk" recovery points as defined by business recovery objectives; I.E., those recovery points that are incomplete, inconsistent, delayed, or failed. The vendor states that this analysis is performed against "hundreds of potential exposures previously identified at customer sites" and additionally includes vendor data protection best practice definitions. Discovered problems can then be relayed to the existing enterprise event management framework for analysis and correction. In addition to the identification of insufficiently protected assets, the vendor notes that the platform can also identify those assets that may be over protected.
The product itself runs on a Windows server. Supported target hosts, DBs, and data protection systems include Solaris, HP-UX, AIX, Linux (SuSE/Red Hat), and Windows; Oracle, MS-SQL, Exchange, Oracle Apps, and SAP R/3; and EMC Symmetrix (storage mapping, SRDF, BCV, Clone Snap), NetApp (storage mapping, Snapshot, SnapMirror), and Veritas NetBackup. The platform also integrates with HP OpenView (log integration).
For managers, administrators, and application owners, the platform provides a timeline and flow-based visualization console that enables them-in "near" real-time-to view the available recovery points along with their status (composition, completeness, etc.) as well as the discovered, implemented data protection schemes in operation. Role-based views are included, and reports can be generated from the central repository; including those that document recoverability trends (such as exposure life cycle) and identify exposure-prone applications.
The vendor states that the platform is able to handle thousands of protected objects and recovery points.
Contact Illuminator for further information.Author: EITPlanet Staff
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