Restoring Windows Apps Wicked Fast

I often find the most compelling product pitches come from companies that don’t try to solve the world’s ills but just claim to do one thing really, really well – and make their technical case persuasively.

Asempra Technologies is a good example. Their specialty is CDP (continuous data protection) for Windows applications such as Exchange email and messaging servers in mid-market companies. CDP, of course, refers to any system that captures and backs up every single change to your data so you (supposedly) never lose critical

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rmation no matter which combination of hardware and software fails at any time. This is a hot area with a lot of competition. Asempra drives its claimed differentiation home by repeating its claim, on multiple slides and in boldface,” that “Asempra is the only company that guarantees your data is usable.”

This tagline only worked, of course, because they made a convincing argument for their Business Continuity Server (BCS). BCS installs a real-time event and data capture agent on each application server and captures transaction events such as I/O writes, and stores a record of each event on as many as four BCS nodes clustered for fault tolerance. When it’s time to restore that data in the wake of a failure, the Asempra agent (the company claims) senses the I/O requests from the application and first recovers the data needed to get the application up and running quickly. Once users have access to the data they need immediately, BCS goes on to recover the rest of the application data in the background.

Between these and other capabilities, Asempra claims it can restore basic functionality for applications such as Exchange in as little as 30 seconds, compared to hours required using other products. It’s newest version also supports Windows apps running in VMware virtualized environments.

Asempra’s BCS doesn’t try to be all things to all people. It currently supports only Windows applications servers and is aimed at mid-market customers. But focusing on one very specific problem (rapid recovery of Windows applications) and explaining in detail how they tackle that problem. Asempra makes a strong case that they’re a viable player in a highly competitive market.