Salford Software is a leading Syncsort Partner specialising in the delivery and support of disaster recovery and backup lifecycle for, amongst others, NetWare, Linux, Windows, Solaris, AIX, OSX, SQL Server, Exchange, GroupWise, Oracle and VMWare.

Syncsort Backup Express (BEX) provide leading edge enterprise class disaster recovery solutions. BEX is truly cross platform supporting the following platforms:

• Windows 2000, 2003, 2008
• Linux (SuSE, Redhat, Debian)
• Open Enterprise Server (NetWare, OES1 Linux and OES2 Linux)
• Mac OSX
• BSD
• Solaris
• Unix (AIX, HP-UX, SCO, Tru64)
• VMWare
• NetApp

As well as all leading applications including:

• Novell GroupWise
• Novell Cluster Services
• Novell eDirectory
• Microsoft Exchange
• Microsoft SQL server
• Microsoft Cluster Services
• Microsoft Sharepoint
• Oracle
• SAP
• Lotus Notes/Domino

BEX is fully cluster aware allowing backups to continue even if a resource fails over.

BEX backups fall into three categories

• Traditional file based backups – this is the traditional backups to tape/disk at the file level
• Disk to Disk to Tape backups – This improves backup times by the backup being made to disk and then as a secondary step migrated to tape this improves restore times as the more recent backups remain on disk with the older backups having been migrated to tape
• OpenStorage based backups – This is a block based backup supported on Windows, Solaris and Linux (RHEL and SLES) which backs up the blocks which have changed since the last backup.

The benefits of OpenStorage backups are:
• Significantly reduced backup window (minutes rather than hours)
• Migration of backups to tape
• Replication of backup to secondary OpenStorage servers allowing full site redundancy.
• Instant Availability – Ability to gain access to the data in seconds.
• BEX Server Recovery – Provides bare metal recovery allowing the whole server to be restored.

Instant Availability

Instant Availability provides access to the data in any OpenStorage backup in seconds. This creates an iSCSI target from your OpenStorage server and mounting this on your server allowing your applications and users to access this data almost immediately allowing you to restore the data at a more convenient time.

BEX Server Recovery

When you backup your whole server using OpenStorage you can restore a whole server following a hardware failure including the operating system and data. This is achieved by booting from a recovery CD and selecting the relevent backup from the OpenStorage server.

VMWare and Instant Availability

With BEX3.1 you can restore a whole machine (either physical or virtual) to a VMWare infrastructure taking care of driver injection (including VMWare tools) and reemoves unneeded drivers. Two options exist around this either a 'full' virtulisation where BEX creates the new machine, restores the data to the VMWare data store and brings the machine up (injecting the necssary drivers) or a live restore where a new machine is created and an iSCSI mapping is made for the disks allowing access to the machine in a matter of minutes. In addition to disaster recovery this can be used for physical to virtual migrations.

Enterprise

BEX is a true enterprise backup solution utilising a master server, device servers and client servers. The master server contains the catalog, administrative interface and scheduler. Data being backuped is transmitted between the client and device servers with only the catalog data being passed to the master server permitting deployments cross sites, counties and country. Backup devices span the whole spectrum from individual tape drives, tape autoloaders, virtual tape libraries and juke boxes. Fibre attached tape drivers are supported allowing backups across existing fabric giving the best performance backups.