Topio Eyes EMC, IBM in Data Protection Market

With big fish such as EMC and IBM in its
sights, Topio unveiled the next generation of its Topio Data Protection
Suite (TDPS) to protect against natural and synthetic disasters that
threaten data integrity.

The Santa Clara, Calif., company presents an alternative to more expensive
storage system replication offerings of larger rivals, allowing users to extend their
data protection outside the data center to branch or remote offices that
don’t have the IT resources or budget to protect themselves.

Founded by former IBM Research engineer Yoram Novick, the software maker
hopes to win market share through unique features in TDPS 2.0, including a
time-stamping tool that ensures 100 percent data consistency and write-order
integrity as the data is replicated to the target site.

According to Betty Woychowski, director of product management at Topio,
improved off-host processing and backup support, advanced restore
capabilities, modular role-based security, and adaptive data reduction let
customers implement disaster recovery and data protection with relative
ease.

Woychowski told internetnews.com the new off-host processing and
backup support in TDPS 2.0 gives customers the ability to run applications
that access and modify data directly from a secondary site’s target storage,
without the need to create additional copies.

This reduces the amount of storage required to run back-up applications at
the secondary site. Once off-host processing or backup is complete, TDPS 2.0
synchronizes the differences from the primary site to the secondary site
without compromising data integrity.

In the event of a disaster, Woychowski said business applications resume at
a secondary site, letting operations continue without interruption. When the
customer wants to resume the applications at the primary site, TDPS 2.0
resynchronizes only the changes at the secondary site.

Competing products reconfigure the entire system, which takes more time and
bandwidth. Moreover, unlike other vendors, TDPS performs online or offline
synchronization.

Disaster recovery products, to be effective, must come with a measure of
security. TDPS 2.0 lets storage administrators privately view or manage
their data and role-based security obviates the need for security
appliances, saving customers money.

TDPS 2.0 is available now from Topio and resellers. Pricing depends on
configuration.

Enterprise Strategy Group analyst Pete Gerr said Topio has distinguished
itself from larger competitors like EMC, IBM, HDS and HP
by providing software that works with Linux, Unix, Windows
and is also hardware and topology agnostic, supporting DAS , NAS
and SAN .

“Topio’s focus on maintaining data integrity throughout the data path means
that customers are more likely to have a successful recovery and that the
recovery can be performed more quickly, helping the organization get back to
business faster,” Gerr told internetnews.com.

“Topio’s solution is also cost-effective, because it’s software-only, but
also because after the initial full data set synchronization, it’s
intelligent enough to replicate only the changed blocks, making efficient
use of customer’s IP network,” Gerr continued.