InMage a replacement for VizionCore & VEEAM?

[PacoMcCloud]

One of my buddies who works at a major company in Tampa just replaced his VizionCore solution with a product called InMage. His team was having problems implementing their DR replication strategy simultaneous with their Backup strategy. First, they could not schedule the two discreet events simultaneously. They had to schedule a backup in one part of the day then the replication to their secondary site the second part of the day. The backup window was already lengthy by itself, but throwing in replication made matters much worse.

VEEAM was not a big help here either. It was faster for the replication, but it was still a "discreet" event that they had to run periodically and the data was just too old to reliably failover to.

They found this technology called InMage, which looks quite promising. It manages to do both the backup and DR replication simultaneously and in REAL TIME! No backup or replication windows at all. It's using CDP replication to stream both remotely (even included WAN compression) as well as locally for backup. As an added bonus, the backup technology includes a superior storage mechanism to deduplication. It's new in their latest release but these guys were very excited about it.

And yes, they replicate the entire VM and even automate failover and failback (missing from SRM).

Has anyone else heard of this or used it yet? Sounds too good to be true.

[Gostev]

These forum are not created for vendors like yourself to advertize their products. And looking at your other posts, you have registered here with the sole purpose of doing that.

Answering your question, no - InMage is not a replacement for Vizioncore & VEEAM, because InMage requires an agent to be deployed in each protected VM. Agent based solutions just do not fly for virtualization DR, period.

I should also note that there are dozen of other solutions with concept similar to InMage available on the market today, some of which are much older and mature, so InMage is definitely not a unique offering. But going back to the title of this topic, those solutions are what InMage might be replacement for.

[PacoMcCloud]

Thanks for the response Gostev. I am not a vendor. In fact, I use your product in our data center and have had reasonable success with it. I run a boutique Cloud Computing firm. I'm looking for something more robust to reduce RPO/RTO. I noticed that you are the PM for VEEAM. Good stuff. Thank you for commenting.

What are some of those other more mature products you mentioned? Can you list them here?

[Gostev]

SyncSort, Marathon, ShadowProtect, AppAssure immediately come to my mind, but for the past 3 years I've ran into many, many other similar solutions. Every solution has own flavor (some are more CDP, other provide consistent imaging, other have special bells&whistles, etc). But they all have largely the same architecture coming from the physical world, and relying on agent running inside of each protected computer to provide block-level incremental replication capability. I am not saying these solutions have no place - they are absolutely perfect, just different niche/play. Best for protecting physical computers, or selected virtualized workloads. Not so good as primary backup/replication solution for hundreds/thousands of VM. And it all goes other way too by the way, I would never claim that Veeam and Vizioncore are replacement for any of these solutions.

I am sorry if you are not a vendor, for me your posts here looked like blunt InMage advertisement. Plus, they are contradicting... first you make statement about far superiority of InMage in another thread (which would mean you are actively using it), but then you create this new topic asking for advice and opinions about this solution, and referring to some "buddy" user instead. So just comparing the posts makes this activity look... a bit suspicious, at least

[PacoMcCloud]

Interesting mention of Marathon there. My team got demos from a couple on that list there... we had an InMage demo and also had one from Marathon and a few others. Turns out they are the same product! The demo looked eerily similar to InMage and when asked about it, they told us that they are OEM partners with InMage, so that's actually their product under the covers.

Why we are looking for something more robust is a lot more intriguing. We use a combo of Symantec, VizionCore, and also VEEAM. Symantec is used for our tape backups. VizionCore for local VM backup (use Symantec for physical servers for Disk-Disk as well) and VEEAM to get the VMs to a "standby" cloud, almost like a DR site, except that it's all in the same Data Center.

We lost an entire Exchange Server and one week of data with that outage. Somehow, and I'm not technical enough to know how this happened, the team could not recover the server. One of the engineers accidentally blew away the entire VM while they were copying a snapshot (the backup). So we nearly lost one of our best customers to this outage.

As we are moving to a secondary data center now for true DR (instead of just a standby), and our financial and healthcare customers are demanding shorter SLAs than what we can deliver today, so we need something else other than what we have.

We looked at RecoveryPoint first... I got sticker shock. So... that's why we are open to some newer technologies and heard about this one. You are the only person that has commented so far, so looks like there's little out there in the VM community to help us with this.

We will start an evaluation in the next 3 weeks, so I'll post those results when I have them.

Thanks for all your help Gostev.