TECA Data Safe Launches VTL Backup Appliance
October 15, 2013 Alex Woodie
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Disaster recovery solution provider TECA Data Safe recently launched Rapid Rebound, a virtual tape library (VTL) designed to hold up to 96 TB of data from IBM i and other servers, and to replicate it across the cloud to TECA’s data center. TECA (Technology Equipment Coverage and Availability) Data Safe has been providing DR services for its customers’ IBM i, Windows, Linux, Unix, and VMware servers since the company was founded eight years ago in Minneapolis, Minnesota. The vendor’s specialty is providing full, hands-on DR services for small and mid-size organizations that can’t afford the big price tags that contracts with Sungard or IBM Business Continuity and Resiliency Services. The new Rapid Rebound appliance appears as a tape drive to IBM i, Windows, Linux, Unix, Hyper-V, XEN, and VMware servers. After writing backups to disk, it deduplicates, compresses, and encrypts the backup before it is replicated to TECA’s data center. In the event of a major disaster, TECA will have a copy of a customer’s data on its servers, and be ready to begin the recovery process almost immediately. Customers will be able to run their critical applications, such as ERP systems, on TECA’s systems until they are ready to resume production on their own servers. Having a Rapid Rebound appliance on-site will help in a couple of situations. First, it will provide a fast and convenient way for customers to recover data following minor outages or mistakes that corrupt or delete data. Recovering data from disk is much faster than futzing around with tapes or waiting on slow network connections. The Rapid Rebound appliance could also serve as staging area for data following a major outage. However, it’s possible that any disaster big enough to impact a production server could also impact the VTL appliance sitting next to the production server on the LAN. Tom Fischer, TECA’s CEO says the recovery process is quick and simple. “With Rapid Rebound, business owners and operators will gain confidence in the knowledge that their backups remain local in addition to being securely replicated off-site. In the event of a disaster, applications and data are recovered in the cloud and made available to the customer once again,” he says. In terms of recovery point objective (RPO), the Rapid Rebound offering will not have a customer’s latest, freshest data. Unless a customer is performing backups throughout a day, the RPO will be 24 hours or less if they are performing nightly backups, just like it would be with regular tape. That RPO is going to be fine for some customers. For customers that need an RPO closer to zero, TECA offers Vision Solutions products, including RecoverNow and high availability solutions. When IT Jungle spoke with TECA in early 2012, executives expressed a preference for the RecoverNow product, which takes periodic “snap shots” of production IBM i databases. Since then, Vision has launched MIMIX DR, which is similar to RecoverNow except that it uses the same IBM i journaling functionality as full HA product use, and can capture and store transactions as soon as they hit the production database. Rapid Rebound supports an unlimited number of virtual tapes, and can scale up to provide 96 TB of storage. The devices sport SCSI, SAS, Ethernet, Fiber, eSATA, and USB connections, the company says. RELATED STORY TECA Data Safe Gives IBM i Customers a DR Lifeline
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