InMage is the leading independent software vendor in developing and delivering comprehensive, disk-based and scalable business application recovery solutions that allow companies to meet stringent disaster recovery, eliminate the impacts of local backups, and manage application uptime to meet high availability requirements. Targeting enterprises, InMage solutions provide solid data protection for high growth data environments while eliminating backups, minimizing data loss on recovery, shortening recovery times, and increasing recovery reliability in heterogeneous environments. InMage uniquely offers granular protection and AppShot technology to further support its customers' local backup, remote disaster recovery and high application availability requirements.

BACK UP

You're backing up because you need to recover, not because you like doing backups. Backups are a pain. They take up your time, they impact business operations, and after all that effort, they don't even always support reliable recovery.

There are two key problems with conventional backup. One is that conventional methods treat backups as a discrete operation, resulting in the "pig through the snake" problem. At a given time, you try to take all the changes since the last backup and push them through your network all at once. As your backups get bigger and your networks don't, you will eventually not be able to complete your daily backups in the available time frames. The second (and related) problem is that tape is still the predominant backup medium. Tape is a sequential access medium whose performance characteristics do not mesh well with the requirements of backups and frequent, object-level restores.

InMage solves this problem in a way which eliminates backup as a discrete operation (hence no more "backup window" problem), allows you to meet the most stringent RPO/RTO requirements, and improves recovery reliability relative to tape at the same time. InMage leverages disk-based recovery, a design decision which gives us access to disk-based technologies like CDP and replication that can eliminate backup impacts while actually improving your recovery capabilities. Using CDP, we stream writes from production servers as they occur throughout the day to our disk-based repository, moving backup from an impactful, discrete operation to a continuous operation that generally imposes no noticeable impacts on the network. Data streams from each server are annotated with time stamps and other tags that mark business process points that are relevant for recovery as well as a number of other business operations (reporting, test, maintenance, etc.). When a disk-based copy of what the production data looked like at any point within that data stream is needed, an administrator can retroactively select that point, generate a disk-based copy, and mount it on any desired server. The creation of these images imposes no impact whatsoever on production servers, and allows administrative operations of all sorts which use copies of production data to be time-shifted to any convenient time, a capability that can help optimize operator productivity.
 

RECOVERY

Sometimes you need to recover just data, and sometimes you need to recover an entire application. The world's best replication and backup solutions just recover data, requiring separate products, tools, and activities to recover applications. Application recovery is defined as the process necessary to recover an application service, like Exchange or Oracle, when that service has failed (due to hardware, software, or network issues). Administrators will generally either do application recovery manually, which is a time-consuming, risky proposition that is very dependent upon the skill set of the administrator, or they will deploy some form of clustering technology. Clustering technologies can shorten recovery times and improve recovery reliability, but because they require the introduction of a separate product, they add to configuration complexity and cost. InMage is a high availability application suite that effectively manages requirements for any application recovery.