Pleasanton, Calif. April 1, 2004 - Alacritus Software, the innovator in disk-based dataprotection solutions, announced today that it will participate in a multi-vendor technologydemonstration with Cisco Systems, Inc.® of a new software feature being developed for theCisco MDS 9000 Family at next week's Storage Networking World in Phoenix, AZ.
The Cisco MDS 9000 Data Tap Service, will provide a protocol-based interface between theCisco MDS 9000 SAN switches and third-party storage appliances, thus allowingChronospan to take full advantage of the industry-leading reliability, scalability, and multi-protocol services available on the Cisco storage area networking (SAN) switch portfolio.
Chronospan replaces traditional labor-intensive and error-prone backup and restoreschemes with a continuous, background process that actually eliminates the backupwindow.
According to David Hill, Vice President of Storage Research for the Aberdeen Group,"Chronospan is the type of intelligent storage service that will enable the Cisco MDS 9000Family to deliver immediate results to the enterprise in terms of advanced data protectiontechnologies, performance, manageability, as well as TCO considerations." Hill continued,"This relationship will help validate the effectiveness deploying Chronospan in a high-performanceenterprise environment. Since Chronospan is entirely removed from theprimary data path, this solution will overcome the barrier of entry into mission criticalenvironments that other CDP vendors still face."
Chronospan delivers the following benefits to the enterprise:
- Chronospan lets enterprises rapidly restore data to Any Point in Time (APITTM). Thismeans that lost data can be immediately recovered to the exact moment before theloss.
- Chronospan actually renders management of complex backup/restore processesunnecessary; in many cases, totally eliminating the need for backup and restoresoftware.
- Chronospan also provides radically faster restore times through the simplification ofthe logical data protection process, the reduction in the burden upon ITadministrators, and the elimination of the backup window.
- In addition to block-level services, Chronospan also offers unique file-level services;where particular files can be easily browsed and restored across multiple points intime.
According to Don Trimmer, Chief Strategic Officer at Alacritus, "Chronospan provides anypoint in time copy protection without the need to explicitly create snapshots at any specifictime. All writes to primary disk are mirrored to the Chronospan disks and are writtensequentially." Trimmer continued, "This has absolutely no impact on the performance ofproduction applications. Storing these mirrored writes actually allows IT administrators tocreate 'on-the-fly' snapshots of the primary disk for any particular time after the fact."
Chronospan logs every write sequentially into a write log. This provides a tremendousperformance advantage to the user, even with low-cost ATA disks. Management of thewrite log is policy based. A Chronospan protection policy defines the APIT window, in whichthe user can roll back to any point in time that has occurred. A policy also providesadditional snapshot views that can span weeks, months and even years.
Chronospan CDP is currently available for early implementations at select customer sitesand will ship in Q2 2004. Alacritus is demonstrating Chronospan in Booth C5 at StorageNetworking World.
Demo Availability
The Chronospan/Cisco MDS 9000 Data Tap Service demo can be viewed at the Ciscobooth (#P10) on Tuesday, April 6 and Wednesday, April 7 during the expo hours atStorage Networking World Spring 2004. SNW Spring 2004 will be held at the JWMarriott Desert Ridge in Phoenix from April 5 through 8.
For more information, contact Alacritus at (925) 469-0725 x 212 or visit the AlacritusSoftware website at www.alacritus.com.
