CA XOsoft
A solution that offers Disaster
Recovery, High Availability and
Continuous Data Protection
™
Responding to a growing need
The data behind every enterprise is vital not only to its current operations,
but also to its continuing success. As the volume of business critical data
and information continues to grow and the application of that data
becomes more important, so does the need to manage it effectively
and protect it thoroughly.
As a consequence, enterprises are demanding solutions that will help them maintain availability of data and applications; provide secure, proven protection of information assets; and contribute significantly to compliance, governance and risk mitigation efforts.
In addition, IT departments are looking for ways to continue meeting enterprise data recovery point objectives (RPOs) and recovery time objectives (RTOs), despite growing demands on infrastructure, time and resources.
”Over half of European IT Directors said ensuring availability of critical
data was a main factor driving their organisation’s strategies.”
What are the challenges of the data-driven age?
So what are the pressing issues and challenges facing enterprises and
companies in today’s data intensive, information rich environment?
The volume of data is growing at an exponential rate. And as the volume of data increases, backup windows shrink placing huge pressure on IT resource and time. Set against this is the added pressure of maintaining recovery target objectives while ensuring that critical data is adequately protected at all times.
Of course, all this wouldn’t be a problem if the resources available kept pace with the growth in demand. But this is becoming less and less the case and eventually the cost would soon become prohibitive.
One way of circumventing this particular issue is to classify data by the value it holds to the organisation and then apportion appropriate levels of protection. That way more resource can be attributed to data of higher value and less to data of low value. It sounds like an ideal solution in theory but the reality, as many organisations have found to their cost, is that aligning appropriate levels of protection is not a simple task.
And even for those companies that do have data protection and recovery systems in place, the cost and time required to test these solutions means that they can quickly become ineffective, placing the organisation at risk and failed audits.
Taking on the challenges
In order to face these challenges companies need to take a more strategic,
comprehensive approach to data protection and recovery management.
They need an approach which meets all the organisation’s criteria for a successful IT implementation – taking into consideration IT and operational costs, available resources as well as business operational needs.
In addition to basic data backup and retrieval the solution needs to accommodate more sophisticated forward-thinking strategies, deliver stronger disaster recovery capabilities and respond to the business continuity requirements of today’s and tomorrow’s demanding environment.
Enterprises today are demanding the very best data recovery solutions
available. Solutions that will maximise business continuity while
minimising risk.
91% of European IT Managers sited continuous data protection as
being beneficial to a business.
CA XOsoft™ – comprehensive data protection
CA XOsoft™ offers the features and performance needed to achieve total
protection and recovery of an enterprise's business-critical information
and enable it to face the challenges of the data-driven era.
CA’s acquisition of XOsoft Inc. has allowed us to provide the industry’s first integrated recovery management solution, incorporating best-of-breed tools covering high performance backup, remote replication, automated failover for high availability, Continuous Data Protection (CDP), Block Level Data recovery and disaster recovery testing.
The result is a unique combination of flexible recovery mechanisms, strong functionality that delivers multi-platform data protection, recovery and availability throughout the enterprise. All of which translates directly into improved operational business and IT efficiencies, reduced operating costs and a robust response to the compliance and regulatory challenges facing businesses today.
The combination of proven and reliable technologies into a single, integrated, easy-to-manage interface makes the CA XOsoft™ solution uniquely aligned with the business goals and data protection needs of every type of business.
CA XOsoft™ can help you respond to these challenges through:
n A comprehensive and multi-layered approach to data protection and recovery— enabling appropriate levels of protection and investment to be assigned to data and applications relative to their value to the business.
n True Continuous Data Protection— ensuring faster and easier retrieval of critical data.
n Automated disaster recovery and failover testing— enabling disaster recovery plans to be tested and modified for an optimum outcome.
n Free bandwidth impact assessment– automatically generates reports that display easy to read statistics, enabling you to plan the resources required for the replication. (Fig5)
n Unobtrusive Installation– deploy a high availability solution without disrupting your production environment.
PAGE 4EBOOK: XOSOFT
In June 2008 CA's XOsoft™ won "storage replication software product of the year" at the 2008 Storries. Hosted by Storage magazine, the Storries celebrate the best in storage products and services, as voted for by the publication's readers.
What is CDP and why is it important?
It’s important to understand that CDP isn’t a technology or a solution; it’s
more a methodology with numerous technological approaches available to
achieve it.
Regardless of the approach taken, CDP can deliver huge benefits to businesses in the data-driven era: faster data retrieval enhanced data protection and increased business continuity. And it can help achieve all these while lowering overall cost and complexity.
Continuous data protection
(CDP) is a methodology that continuously
captures or tracks data modifications and stores changes independent
of the primary data, enabling recovery points from any point in the
past. CDP systems may be block, file or application-based and can
provide fine granularities of restorable objects to infinitely variable
recovery points.
Data Protection Initiative Buyer’s Guide, First Edition – Spring 2007, SNIA Data Management Forum.
Why CA XOsoft™ is the right choice for CDP
CA is the first provider to offer a recovery management solution that integrates CDP
with real-time replication (true CDP). The CA XOsoft™ solutions, Replication and High
Availability, (formerly WANSync and WANSyncHA) provide advanced industry
standard core replication technologies as well as many unique and groundbreaking
features, some of which are described here.
Rewind technology delivering true CDP
Your system gets corrupted from a particularly virulent virus. What can you do? Strip everything down and rebuild it piece by piece, application by application, database by database. Forget it, there’s a better way with CA’s rewind technology.
Should any type of logical or physical corruption occur, your databases or files can be returned to the last good state, desired version, database checkpoint or log rotation. User error, viruses, application error or anything that makes your data unusable can be resolved both quickly and easily. (Fig.4.)
Where CDP comes into its element is with Disaster Recovery systems. Traditional replicated data can be just as much at risk as the data it is replicating. By integrating CDP you have the option to roll back your replicated data to a known good point of time, giving you complete confidence in your DR system.
Rewind (true CDP) is very different from backups and snapshots which provide a representation of your data at a specific point in time. Should a failure occur, all data since the last backup or snapshot will be lost. CA’s XOsoft™ Replication and High Availability include rewind technology allowing recovery to the actual last good state. So rather than supersede backups or snapshots, the rewind technology fills in the gaps by adding an additional layer of protection.
Assured Recovery for transparent testing of your replica server
Replica server application and database testing is very important but is performed all too infrequently. This infrequency is primarily due to the amount of administrative involvement required and the fact that many scenarios leave systems, applications and data unprotected during testing. And as those systems become ever more complex and compliance requirements are further rolled out, the need to test DR plans and systems is becoming even more vital.
Assured Recovery will transparently bring your replica Exchange/SQL/Oracle services and databases online for automated (or manual) testing on a scheduled basis. Not only does Assured Recovery require no admin involvement but we don’t even stop replication so you are still protected during the test. Assured Recovery is unique to CA XOsoft™ and even patented.
Why CA XOsoft™ is the right choice for CDP ...continued
Application aware engine at the heart of the solution
The CA XOsoft™ engine is a self-contained application aware service – which means it provides more features and reliability in a secure package. With CA XOsoft™, scripts are not required to realise the solution’s full potential with Exchange, SQL, Oracle and IIS as all operations from replication, testing, rewind and even failover/failback are carried out by the CA XOsoft™ engine service.
”The CA XOsoft™ product suite has been key to delivering a business
continuity solution for Ordnance Survey Ireland,” says Cormac Clancy.
“We found CA XOsoft™ to be the best data replication solution for us
because it is unobtrusive, has low bandwidth requirements and is
application-aware.”
General Manager, Ordnance Survey Ireland.
Why CA XOsoft™ is the right choice for CDP ...continued
PAGE 8 EBOOK: XOSOFT
Fig 4:Snapshot management interface simplifies recovery of day-to-day files.
Fig 5:Free Bandwidth impact assessment within CA XOsoft™, automatically generates reports that display easy to read statistics.
Bandwidth benchmarking assessment mode allows you to estimate bandwidth requirements prior to the deployment of any replication solution. This provides greater cost control by knowing exactly what your requirements are so that you can purchase only the bandwidth you need to meet your business needs. Furthermore, CA XOsoft does not require a server reboot on installation which means no disruption to your service, application or users.
Time Stamp Bytes Compressed Bytes
Compressed Ratio
16 Nov 07 10.19.00 0Bytes 0Bytes 0
16 Nov 07 10.20.00 0Bytes 0Bytes 0
16 Nov 07 10.21.00 0Bytes 0Bytes 0
16 Nov 07 10.22.00 0Bytes 0Bytes 0
16 Nov 07 10.23.00 0Bytes 0Bytes 0
16 Nov 07 10.24.00 20.07KB 5.48KB 73
16 Nov 07 10.25.00 31MB 1.78MB 54
16 Nov 07 10.26.00 0Bytes 0Bytes 0
Comparison Mode:
Scenario: Rep-1:
Master host: 10.0.0.6(1)
Scenario start time: 16-Nov-07 10.19.47
Report start time: 16-Nov-07 10.19.47
Report finish time: 16-Nov-07 10.26.47
Assessment Mode Report
Summary
Data Max size 3.8MB
Data Min size 0Bytes
Data Avg size 489.22KB
Compressed data max size 1.78MB
Compressed data main size 0Bytes
The best tools for the job, included as standard
The CA XOsoft™ r12 Solution comprises of three main components:
CA XOsoft™ Replication (formerly WANSync™)
CA XOsoft™ WANSync™ is primarily concerned with delivering a data recovery solution to the enterprise through asynchronous, real-time data replication. Provides branch office protection and web distribution.
CA XOsoft™ High Availability (formerly WANSync™ HA)
CA XOsoft™ HA adds automatic and semi-automatic pushbutton failover and failback for even greater simplicity of operation. In failover mode, the Users can continue to operate on a hot standby server without the need to configure their client workstation.
CA XOsoft™ Assured Recovery
CA XOsoft™ Assured Recovery is a breakthrough technology that makes your disaster recovery investment truly complete by enabling you to conduct comprehensive and regular tests of your disaster recovery standby servers without any disruption to your production servers or any interruption to your disaster recovery protection.
In addition, the solution integrates a number of valuable management tools and features, into a single interface. (Fig.3.)
So now you can confidently:
n Failover the production application to a hot standby server that can be physical or virtual, should the server suffer a hardware fault or application fault
n Rewind your production database just after it got hit by a virus or a corruption using a simplified user interface.
n Test the integrity of your application more frequently without disrupting users.
