Business Continuity Server™

Architecture

The Asempra Business Continuity Server (BCS) is a real-time solution designed to provide continuous availability for Windows applications and data by insuring against data loss and downtime.
 
With an all-in-one design, the Asempra BCS dramatically reduces the cost and complexity of mid-market IT data protection. A comprehensive feature set addresses critical requirements for continuous availability, disaster recovery, data protection, business continuity, and recovery management.
 
The BCS uses very lightweight host agents deployed across standard LAN or WAN IP networks to continuously capture all metadata, database logs, and every data event in Microsoft Windows environments.  The host agents send the real-time data to the BCS Real-Time Event Journal.

Figure 1: Business Continuity Server Components

The architecture of the BCS consists of three primary components:

• BCS Continuous Protection Agent
• BCS Real-Time Event Journal
• BCS Management Server

BCS Continuous Protection Agents

Protect every server, Microsoft cluster, or Windows application running on VMware by installing an extremely lightweight BCS Continuous Protection Agent. The Continuous Protection Agent makes a copy of the data to be protected every time an application writes to its connected storage. This copy is made out of the primary data path between the application and its attached storage, minimizing any performance impact. The Continuous Protection Agent then streams real-time events, metadata, and delta strings to a BCS Real-Time Event Journal running on the Asempra appliance. Unlike other products that must send whole files every time there is any change made to the primary data, the Continuous Protection Agents only send byte-level delta changes, substantially reducing the network and storage demands for protected data.  These byte-level delta changes provide data deduplication in-file.

BCS Real-Time Event Journal

The Business Continuity Server ensures consistent, uncorrupted data through the use of its patented Real-Time Event Journaling. Incorporating advanced three-dimensional indexing techniques, the Real-Time Event Journal collects all information associated with the protected data (events, metadata, and data) in a real-time object catalog. These elements preserve a complete data history of the application with consistency marking, allowing application events and data to be restored to any level of granularity required. Recover an individual object, such as an e-mail or single file, or an entire server farm – at any point-in-time. Application-aware integrity checks insure the data is always usable on the first recovery.

BCS Management Server

The BCS Management Server is a data management application platform which includes a GUI for displaying the real-time object catalog for user management of the BCS and data recovery. The BCS GUI features multiple time dials (days, hours, minutes, and seconds) for navigating data over a range of time.

The BCS Management Server is so easy-to-use that recovery, often a process that has more than 10 – 15 steps, is only a right click recover.  In three simple steps, the data you select is recovered instantaneously.