Data Recovery Via A Truck

Disruptions can hit at any time, but it's critical that they don't halt business operations. Two vendors, AmeriVault Corp. and XOSoft Inc., joined forces Monday to give companies a new option for recovering data in times of outages.

AmeriVault brings business-continuity software and services to this partnership and XOSoft provides its WANSync data-availability software. By year's end, AmeriVault says it will include XOSoft's WANSync software in its own Hotbox data recovery offering. The WANSync software maintains replicated versions of databases and apps through continuous synchronization.

With the new service, companies can continuously replicate their data to a mobile computer hosted by AmeriVault. If there's ever an outage, AmeriVault will deliver that mobile device--with all the replicated information up to the moment of the outage--to the customer in need.

The service provides an added layer of business continuity. Online replication and recovery is the optimal approach to business continuity, compared with tape-based backup and recovery, but if the network is down, there's no way to retrieve information.

Still, one industry analyst thinks the hours it would take to recover the information via the mobile computer wouldn't work for a customer such as a large bank. "But if a customer has nothing offsite, the price is probably within the ballpark," says Mike Kahn, founder and analyst at The Clipper Group. "Long-distance recovery of a lot of data over IP might be better, but it's also a lot more expensive to do."