Storix Makes Recovery Flexible

Storix hopes its unique backup and recovery approach will help it stand out in a crowded market.

So far, it’s off to a good start.

The nine-year-old company is profitable and boasts more than 500 customers, among them IBM, Whirlpool, SunGard and Wal-Mart. Now it hopes to build on that success with its latest launch.

While at IBM, Storix founder Anthony Johnson developed IBM AIX Sysback, the original backup and recovery product for AIX. Storix built on that legacy and added support for Linux in 2002.

The company says its System Backup Administrator (SBAdmin) offers an easy to use graphical interface for centralized management of system and data backup. It can also reinstall a complete system from scratch and restore the backup onto a different hardware environment .

Johnson says SBAdmin offers “the only truly adaptable system recovery. At the very least, we do far more than anyone else.”

“Unlike typical disk-image backup software, SBAdmin rebuilds the system from the ground up,” said Johnson.

Dianne McAdam, director of Enterprise Information Assurance for The Clipper Group, says Storix “provides a flexible approach to system recovery. Unlike typical disk-imaging restore utilities that require the backup image to be restored to the identical hardware configuration, SBAdmin has the ability to migrate that image to new hardware configurations — even from physical to virtual machines. Also, it can be used to reconfigure the storage for better I/O performance and higher ROI of their customers’ heterogeneous disk environments.”

The software can take images of an RS/6000 system and restore it to a different RS/6000 system, said McAdam, and backup servers can be reconfigured if one server is more heavily utilized than another.

SBAdmin version 6 for Linux and AIX offers both daily backup management and the ability to migrate systems to different hardware or to provision new systems. The restore process takes the backup and adapts it to the hardware detected during installation, rebuilding the failed system to its prior state. The complete restore from bare metal can be managed locally or remotely. If the software detects differences between the backup and newly detected hardware, it will make recommendations such as selection of new disks or automated shrinking of file systems.

New features include remote recovery and notification and retention policies, and optional features include backup data encryption with simplified key management, Oracle database backup integration, and Windows and Mac OSX data backups. SBAdmin supports all Intel-based (x86/Pentium), IBM pSeries (32/64-bit) and HP Itanium 2 systems.

Jeff Bast, lead Unix systems administrator at Schneider National, said his company uses Storix for backup, recovery and cloning of Suse and Redhat Linux running on standalone, VMware hosts and blade servers. He reports that system recoveries with the product have been a complete success.”

Dale Inman of Bridgestone Americas reports similar success. “We have not had a single instance where we were unable to restore anything from a single file up to an entire system,” he said.

Storix offers free support for the life of each version of SBAdmin and discounts for upgrading to new versions. Pricing starts at $895 for the network administrator, $395 for additional backup client/server licenses, and $459 for the commercial standalone workstation edition. Free trials are available at: http://www.storix.com/support/downloads.html.

Double-Take Software also unveiled software this week that enables real-time protection of entire systems, not just data.

Double-Take’s technology is being made available in two new product offerings — the Double-Take Server Recovery Option and Double-Take ShadowCaster, “providing customers the ability to restore entire servers, including the operating system, applications and data — even to servers with different hardware configurations.” Windows Small Business Server is also targeted by the products.

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