Onaro Launches SANscreen™ Business Continuity for Continuous Validation of Disaster Recovery
Policy validation and audit reporting for replicated data environments ensure regulatory compliance
BOSTON, Mass. -- September 28, 2005 -- Onaro, Inc., a pioneer of change management software for storage networks, today introduced SANscreen Business Continuity that provides continuous assurance that applications are immediately recoverable in the event of data corruption or disaster. With SANscreen Business Continuity, companies for the first time continuously monitor and verify replicated configurations in real time as changes are made. This provides complete confidence that critical business applications and data are recoverable in the event of a disaster and ensures that stringent regulatory compliance requirements are continuously met.
“Storage managers are dealing with increasing complexity in changing storage environments as their businesses strive for competitive advantage with new applications,” said Ray Paquet, managing vice president at Gartner. “Every change has to be reflected into the replicated storage environment to assure application recoverability, and the validation of this change process is often manual and subsequently error prone. To assure application recovery objectives are met, validation must be continuous and automated from end to end, across the replicated data path.”
Corporations are investing to ensure recoverability in the wake of a disaster, a data center outage, storage array outage, or data corruption event. According to Gartner, Inc., data replication is expected to grow at a CAGR of 14.3 percent as compliance requirements are added to recovery initiatives as drivers of growth. In addition, Gartner predicts that the data replication market is expected to grow from $1.4 billion in 2004 to $2.6 billion by 2009 (see note 1).
Testing these disaster recovery data environments is expensive, time consuming and usually only performed annually or bi-annually. With Fortune 1000 financial services organizations making on average more than 500 routine networked storage changes a week, the potential for significant application failures when disaster strikes is huge.
Sarbanes-Oxley regulations have only increased the demand and complexity of these tests as companies are required to report on application specific disaster recover processes and executives now carry legal liability for lost or corrupt data.
“For every dollar spent to store data, companies are spending four to ten dollars on replication of that data to make sure it is recoverable and available in the event of disaster. That is a huge investment in an environment that is subject to continuous change and rarely tested. The risks are unacceptable to the compliance and risk officers,” said Andrew Bird, vice president of marketing at Onaro. “Customers need to know that when a disaster strikes, applications will be available and work properly. Our market feedback shows that 10 to 15% of application replication policies are not being met, meaning 10 to 15% of applications are at risk of recoverability. That might not sound like much, but when looking at mission-critical databases, any loss of data quickly translates into significant revenue losses, damaged reputation and even lawsuits.”
By conducting real-time analysis and monitoring of end-to-end replication data paths and application recoverability according to pre-set policy objectives, SANscreen Business Continuity delivers the following business benefits:
Helps organizations avoid data and application recovery risks by ensuring availability
Ensures organizations meet compliance requirements for backed up data and application recoverability
Enables disaster recovery planning, and provides detailed impact analysis
Reduces the costs and overhead associated with disaster recovery testing
Improves corporate reporting and auditing compliance
Promotes consistency of replication policies across application classes
End-to-end visibility of the disaster recovery environment delivers the information to make informed purchasing decisions
Onaro SANscreen Business Continuity
SANscreen Business Continuity is a new SANscreen package that extends the SANscreen suite and is separately licensed. The product seamlessly integrates with SANscreen, Onaro’s award winning product for Predictive Change Management in Storage Area Networks (SANs). Like SANscreen, it is agent-less, fast to install, and delivers value literally within hours. SANscreen Business Continuity is generally available, pricing available on request. SANscreen Business Continuity easily scales with the size of the managed environment.
SANscreen Business Continuity adds the following key characteristics and features to any SAN management model:
Compliance reports for DR policy compliance, risk assessment, DR costs, etc.
Real-time analysis and monitoring of end-to-end replication paths and application recoverability according to pre-set policy objectives
User-customizable repository of application/server-based replication policies
Record of all replication changes, policy changes and violation in real-time for audit
Root-cause analysis that presents a context log of changes that caused an application recoverability violation
Root-cause analysis to recommend a change plan to an outstanding violation
Simulation and modeling to provide complete impact analysis of every single SAN change on application recoverability
Uniform management for heterogeneous environments
About Onaro, Inc.
Onaro pioneered change management for SANs, enabling enterprises to ensure regulatory compliance and storage service levels by quickly and effectively controlling change and managing growth in complex Storage Area Networks through SANscreen® Monitoring and Predictive Change Management software. For more information, please visit http://www.onaro.com.
SANscreen is a registered trademark of Onaro, Inc. All other trademarks are property of their respective owners.
Notes:
1 “Forecast: Storage Management Software, Worldwide, 2002-2009,” Gartner, Inc., Carolyn DiCenzo, May 4, 2005