ASEMPRA takes CDP up a notch

I had a briefing today with ASEMPRA, and it looks like they've got something to talk about with their Windows-specific CDP product.

ASEMPRA has a CDP product aimed at the mid-market that protects Windows, Exchange, and SQL Server.  Along with the typical CDP cool stuff (RPOs of zero, no full backups required, no downtime for backups, etc), they've got a few bits that sound unique.  Tell me what you think.

  1. They can recover a volume in place instantaneously.  It goes something like this:
    1. Stop using the volume for a couple of second (e.g. take the bad Exchange storage group offline)
    2. Start a ASEMPRA restore and select the point in time that you want to restore to (takes about twenty seconds)
    3. Start using the volume again (take the storage group online)
    4. The application can now begin using the volume as if it's already been recovered.  (For those of you familiar with the concept, this is similar to the way a BCV restore work, except you didn't have to buy a BCV.)
  2. (A typical CDP restore would have Exchange or SQL use some other mount point while it was restoring the real one.  These guys just do it in place, and invisible to the app.  All they need is a few seconds while the app isn't using the volume.)
  3. When you recover a filesystem, they guarantee that you don't need a chkdsk on the volume and that every file was recovered to a consistent point.  (Other CDP products recover the whole volume to a single point in time, which may require an fsck or chkdsk to be consistent.)
  4. When you recover a database, they understand the transactions that won't be consistent based on the recovery point you selected, and recover the blocks they would change prior to that point.  In other words, when they're done, you do NOT have to do a crash recovery the way you do with other CDP solutions.

Certainly sounds interesting.  Anyone tried it?    

Written by W. Curtis Preston (@wcpreston), four-time O'Reilly author, and host of The Backup Wrap-up podcast. I am now the Technology Evangelist at Sullivan Strickler, which helps companies manage their legacy data

2 comments
  • What is there to say besides "-)oes it really work under load?" and "Can I afford it?" ^_^

    If I were wearing my industry Windows sysadmin hat again, I’d buy their stuff in a second if my company could afford it. It would have been extremely helpful a decade ago when I last I did that in earnest.

    – Harold

  • The answers are "That’s a great question for ASEMPRA. I of course have no idea. I’ve never used it in production" and "Since they’re pricing it at the mid-market, I’d guess it’s a yes."