Intel/InMage Delivers Business Continuity to the Lilliputian Server World

Many IT vendors tend to focus on the mid-market to enterprise market space, yet there is a sizable SMB market where customers actively purchase physical servers on a one-at-a-time basis. This might be called (in fond memory of Jonathan Swift’s Gulliver’s Travels) the Lilliputian server market.

However, whatever it may lack in the size of sales, it makes up in the overall volume. And this is a market that welcomes channel partners that provide the IT value-added skill sets and capabilities that many SMB businesses simply cannot afford to support in house. Despite their small size, business continuity is still critical to SMBs.

Intel, in conjunction with InMage Software, is now delivering a well-crafted business continuity solution that channel partners can use with their SMB clients — the recently announced Intel Server Continuity Suite, which enables its channel partners to deliver business continuity to SMBs.

Business continuity is a core function that attempts to prevent — or failing that, to minimize — disruptions to business processes. All sizes of organizations have critical business processes that are vital to achieving success-oriented objectives. Degrees of disruption cover a continuum of negative impacts from minor (minimal inconvenience or productivity loss) to severe (significant economic consequences).

With the new Server Continuity Suite (SCS), Intel has delivered the primary business continuity capabilities that SMBs require. Using Intel SCS, IT administrators can manage server hardware, direct-attached storage (DAS), and backup/recovery from any place and time.

The solution cuts through potential complexity and is simple to use. Now this is often stated as necessary for SMBs, which do not have the specialized depth and breadth of IT resources available to them that larger organizations may have. Still, that is something that should also apply to larger organizations as well (who is against simplicity and lack of complexity?). The problem is that creating simple-to-use solutions is hard work (we'll see an example of that shortly in the GUI). Also, no corners can be cut in providing the solution. This is not a downsized larger solution, but one that was designed to meet the specific needs of SMBs.

The three components of SCS are server management (which Intel provides), RAID management, and data protection (which Intel has collaborated with InMage to provide).

Obviously, Intel takes a server-centric approach to systems, but that is the way that server administrators view it, as well. Since the company provides the motherboard, it can use its board management controller to monitor events and report alerts to an IT administrator, such as when a temperature exceeds a given threshold. This is an example (as part of an overall integration with the other two components of SCS, as well) of managing "Predictive Failure," which informs a server administrator when the system might go down. This allows the administrator to take preemptive corrective action to prevent or minimize application unavailability and thus avoid a negative business continuity impacting event.

The second component is RAID management. The server system includes hard disk drives (HDDs) as direct attached storage (DAS). RAID provides the necessary redundancy to overcome a mechanical hard drive failure — another potential business continuity impacting event. Intel has collaborated with LSI to provide this capability.

The third component is data protection which InMage, a software company that specializes in application and data recovery, provides to Intel SCS. Although InMage does not have the name recognition of some other companies, it has long had a strong disk-based application and data protection strategy built on a concept called continuous data protection (CDP) that is both simple and elegant, performing all that data deduplication promises and even more. As the Intel SCS Data Protection Manager, there is no backup window, no scheduled backups, and no performance hit. Recovery can be at any point in time.

The term that InMage uses is to “rewind” your data rather than “recover” or ‘restore” it, and leverages a virtual view technology to accomplish this. Where RAID provides physical data protection, virtual view technology enables recovery from logical data protection problems, such as a virus attack. With virtual view, an IT administrator can roll back to a point before a virus attack, a bad patch, or an improper software install. Though end users may inadvertently delete an old document or e-mail, the administrator has the ability to do a fine-grained search to recover only what was missing. Since fine-grained recovery is the one most often needed, why should you spend time recovering the haystack when you only want to recover the needle (and already know where it is)?

All three Intel SCS components are integrated and managed through a common graphical user interface (GUI). Now, all GUIs are not created equal. This is particularly the case with Intel’s GUI, which focuses on visualization and real graphics that take advantage of the human ability to process patterns easily with the eyes, rather than text, which may be beloved by accountants, but may not easily convey information to IT administrators.

Hmmm, Intel SCS’s GUI appears to be a simple approach to overcoming and even dissolving apparent complexity.Let's summarize three key capabilities of the Intel SCS. The loss or corruption of a local file can be resolved within seconds. The loss or corruption of an application database or file system caused by software bugs or something else takes longer, i.e., minutes, but that is more than acceptable. Loss of a physical or virtual server due to a backplane failure or human error can take minutes to a few hours to repair, but this should be very reassuring to IT staff, as the old way of doing business would likely have been much longer.

Note that the current version of Intel SCS is designed specifically for local business continuity. Adding disaster recovery, such as protecting against local destruction of an IT facility (fire, flood) or regional destruction (earthquake, hurricane) is likely to be in the plans for a future release and should build upon the Intel/InMage collaboration, as InMage has a lot of experience in disaster recovery. Organizations should not wait, however. Solve the first problem now and be in a good position to do more later on.Note also that businesses with very limited IT resources that depend on trusted IT advisors for support can delegate SCS responsibilities, since systems can be easily managed remotely.

Mesabi Musings
How does a small market become big? One answer is whenever the relatively small size of individual purchases is outweighed by a large number of transactions. Many, many small organizations buy servers one at a time and run them in a standalone mode. These servers are really systems as DAS is typically bundled in as part of the package. But no matter how small a system might be, preventing the disruption of key organization processes (i.e. business continuity) is essential.

Intel is now addressing this market need through its Server Continuity Suite which integrates server management, RAID management, and data protection. To Intel, server management is literally built into their DNA, but they wisely reached out via collaboration to InMage for the software data protection skills. I say wisely, as I have followed InMage for a number of years, and I feel that the company has very strong software applications and data recovery capabilities. Overall, SMBs will be doing themselves a favor by evaluating the benefits of Intel SCS.

At the time of publication neither Intel nor InMage is a client of David Hill and the Mesabi Group.