To-the-Minute Data Restoration

"What we have done is gone through and laid the foundation for active state management," says Lee Cormier, product line manager at PowerQuest, based in Orem, Utah. "What's happening today is that customers are demanding the ability to not only recover quickly, but to recover to their current operational environment."

After dealing with his share of tape-related backup quagmires, including one ill-fated server restoration that took three days to complete, Bill Carn, president of Austin Software Products, in January opted to try PowerQuest's disk-to-disk imaging backup product. He's sold on it, touting its speed and accuracy, as well as the ability to install and restore single files from a larger image. The new incremental backup feature allows images to be taken from pieces of the system, as opposed to an entire snapshot, giving administrators the ability to restore those smaller files and elements as needed.

"I think it has potential to change how small-business people back up their systems," says Carn, whose Pacifica, Calif.-based company specializes in selling, deploying and servicing solutions based on Microsoft Small Business Server. "If I were Veritas, I'd be nervous."

Tape stalwart Veritas might not be quaking in its boots just yet, as even PowerQuest officials view their technology as a complement to the longer-term archiving of tape systems, but PowerQuest just might be onto something refreshing with its somewhat-novel approach to system backup and recovery that hinges on capturing active, point-in-time images saved on hidden-disk partitions. This process executes without interrupting system usage.

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Other companies, including NovaStor, exploit imaging technologies, but none is as simple to implement and manage, according to Carn, who says NovaStor's solution is solid but too technical for the average business user.

PowerQuest V2i Protector 2.0 comes in both a desktop and server version and sports enhancements to the incremental backup and imaging capabilities, according to Cormier. At its core, the product segments portions of a system's hard drive into hidden partitions on which to store snapshot images of the operating system, applications, data and other system fundamentals. While not available to the user, this volume-level partition is constantly being updated via agent technology with compressed images of the system's current state, officials say. The exact replica is also portable and can be saved to removable media such as CD or DVD, as well as tape or another active drive on the network. Administrators can then set access rights and privileges for the replica.

Brandon Nordquist, technical product manager for PowerQuest, explains the way the solution works by offering a case scenario of a server in an outsourcing facility: The server is operating perfectly at 8 a.m. on a typical workday. But by noon, users connected to this server are beginning to report virus activity on their systems. Using V2i Protector 2.0, a solution provider can--within seconds in many cases--initiate a process that rolls the server back to the last point in time in which it was in a clean state, all by mounting images from the hidden volume file. If designated, V2i Protector 2.0 will also conduct a virus scan on that image before rolling it out actively to make sure it is indeed pristine, Nordquist says.

David Boosamra, IT administrator at Antidote Design, an outsourcing solution provider that beta-tested V2i Protector 2.0, says he was quite impressed by the product, initially expecting to be sampling another run-of-the-mill backup recovery solution. "But when I received it, I was surprised to find out it was disk-oriented and disk-managed," says Boosamra, whose Truckee, Calif.-based company provides outsourced Web-site IT and other services. "This is a paradigm shift because most people do this sort of thing by tape. And this solution lets you scale across an enterprise and store data on a SAN, a NAS or local hard drives, which is incredible."

Three-Pronged Approach
PowerQuest officials describe the company's approach to systems and data protection as three-tiered: build, protect and manage. The "build" part of the equation comes into play during the OEMs' or systems builders' initial computer setups, when PowerQuest products can aid with image creation, partitioning, asset management, system migration and deployment. Solution providers can use PowerQuest to "protect" their customers' systems by creating incremental backup images that can be stored and used for disaster recovery. Meanwhile, PowerQuest is continuing to enhance their ability to manage systems, most recently with the introduction of a new user interface, Active Directory support, and a remote-management feature in the server edition of V2i Protector, making administration of multiple Windows server and desktop environments easier.

"This lets you list a variety of devices on one interface," Cormier says. "From there, you can configure a backup process for each device [and the server agents go out automatically] without having to go out individually to each device."

Other new enhancements include:

In addition, V2i Protector 2.0 Server Edition now supports Windows NT Server and Windows 2003 Server in addition to Windows 2000 Server and Windows 2000 Advanced Server. V2i Protector 2.0 Desktop Edition provides support for Windows XP Home, Windows XP Professional and Windows 2000 Professional systems.

PowerQuest V2i Protector 2.0 Server Edition is priced at $995 per server. PowerQuest V2i Protector 2.0 Desktop Edition is priced at $79 per workstation.

Antidote's Boosamra says that the main benefit of the imaging solution is derived in time saved. For example, when a critical server at one of Antidote's financial services clients kept crashing with corrupted databases, Boosamra says he was relieved not to have to go back into the tape vault to find and reinstall the server OS and related files.

"That would have taken us hours; fishing through the tape is so time-consuming," he says. "With PowerQuest, we could, in minutes, do a partial restore of only what we needed."

Features of PowerQuest
V2i Protector 2.0