Lakeview to Add Continuous Data Protection to MIMIX

Published: June 27, 2006

by Alex Woodie

Lakeview Technology last week unveiled plans to add continuous data protection (CDP) technology to its MIMIX ha1 line of high availability software for iSeries servers. CDP is used to safeguard the accidental or intentional deletion or corruption of important files by taking periodic snapshots of the files, which can be later restored by the user. The new CDP capabilities will be available in its MIMIX ha1 line sometime next month, Lakeview says.

There are some troublesome issues on how to best recover a lost or corrupted file. Companies that still rely on tape-based backup solutions will need to mount a tape to restore a specific file, and then recreate that file with the most recent data. This is the most common method, and the slowest, since the recovery from tape is slow, and the rebuilding process is done manually.

Organizations that have moved up to disk-based backups, through virtual tape libraries (VTLs) or similar products, can recover the file quicker. However, if backups to the VTL are only taken every 24 hours, the user may lose an unacceptable amount of work done up to the point of loss or corruption by reverting to the day-ago version, necessitating more manual rebuilding. Even real-time replication solutions, such as Lakeview's MIMIX ha1, aren't up to the task, because they continually write over the older data.

These issues are what have heralded in a new product class, commonly referred to as CDP. The new CDP products coming onto the market provide a finer-grained approach to file restoration, one that combines the speed of disk-based recovery with the continuous nature of real-time file replication. (Gartner, it's probably worth noting, differentiates between "true" CDP products, which can restore files to any point in time, as opposed to "near" CDP products, which can only restore to specific points in time.)

Windows shops have a surplus of CDP vendors to turn to. Just last fall, Microsoft shipped its System Center Data Protection Manager, which was followed a week later by Symantec and its Backup Exec 10d for Windows Server. There have been several CDP options for OS/400 shops, including Atempo's Time Navigator 4.0, which shipped about 15 months ago. But the product is nowhere near mainstream on the OS/400 platform.

Now, Lakeview is getting into the CDP act. The Chicago company, which for years has been a leader in OS/400 high availability, has built new CDP features into the file and object replication capabilities of its MIMIX ha1 and ha1 lite (remote-journaling based) offerings. The software should be available next month as a service release, which is free to customers on maintenance.

Lakeview's implementation will be a near CDP solution, as it will allow users to recover a specific file or groups of files to some point in the near past, says Michael Ross, Lakeview's director of product management. "What you configure is a window of time, an optimized recovery window, and you can recover any point in time in that window," he says. Early feedback from MIMIX customers indicates they are most interested in being able to roll back in increments of four, eight, and 12 hours, Ross says.

Lakeview's CDP offering will give administrators the capability to say which file, group of files, or entire databases will be protected by CDP, and which ones should not be, which is the same way that MIMIX replication is implemented. Users will be able to restore lost or corrupted files from a 5250 green screen interface or from the Web-based GUI.

CDP will protect IT administrators from a lot of pain, Ross says. This includes the variation on Murphy's Law, which says if a backup is scheduled for midnight, a user will corrupt the database at 11:55 p.m. "No HA solution on the iSeries would protect you from that," Ross says.

When the new capability ships next month, MIMIX ha1 will be the only OS/400 high availability product that provides CDP capabilities, according to Lakeview. While this may sound initially like a marketing claim of dubious importance, it is significant, for two reasons.

First and most importantly, embedding the CDP process into the MIMIX replication process reduces the disk and bandwidth overhead that would normally be associated with CDP. "If we were just providing CDP capability on a standalone basis, there'd be some performance hits," says Bill Hammond, a product marketing director with Lakeview. "But we're incorporating this with MIMIX, so it isn't going to add anything over and above [the CPWs taken up by MIMIX] It's done in-stream."

Secondly, replication and CDP technologies are merging, according to Gartner. "We have noticed that traditional backup vendors are expanding their technology capabilities to capture data more frequently and provide their customers with faster recovery methods with less data loss," says Dave Russell, a research director with the analyst group.