This week, NuView announced its Data on Demand Manager (DDM), a data recovery tool that rounds out the company’s portfolio of data management solutions. DDM is designed to decrease the recovery time objective (RTO) for disk-based backups.
The other pieces of NuView’s data management stack include the StorageX NAS/file virtualization platform, which is built on a global namespace foundation; File Lifecycle Manager (FLM), which manages the life cycle of data on Network Appliance storage systems; and MyView, which was announced last month and provides a central view of users’ access and authorization to distributed file data throughout an enterprise.
DDM works with disk-to-disk (D2D) backup products from Symantec/Veritas, EMC/Legato, CommVault, and others. If a primary server experiences downtime for any reason—virus, administrator error, disk failure, or disaster—individual users can access their files without having to wait for an IT administrator to do a full restore of the system. With traditional tape backup, a full restore could take hours or even days.
Access to files can be prioritized by the role of the user and by the criticality of the data itself. For example, it may be more important for the sales department to be up and running with access to mission-critical databases than it is for support staff to access Word documents. And data that is less than 30 days old may be given the highest priority.
DDM creates “mini-files” of replicated data on the new primary server as soon as the failure occurs at the original data source. User requests are directed to the new primary server, and individual files are restored as soon as a user double-clicks on the file name. The policy-based full restore then occurs in the background.
In addition to faster restores, DDM can be used for high-speed migrations between heterogeneous systems. NuView claims a reduction in time required to migrate data from old file servers to NAS devices from hours to minutes.
(Although NuView partners with Network Appliance on its FLM product, and NetApp resells NuView’s StorageX, there are no current plans for NetApp to resell DDM.)
DDM is currently in beta, with production shipments due within 30 days. Pricing starts at $10,000 per server protected, regardless of capacity.