Technology

Persistent Storage Manager (PSM) products deliver Live Primary Data Protection for servers or appliances running Windows NT 4.0, 2000, XP, and Windows 2003 by creating 1,000 point-in-time Persistent True Images or snapshots of the data volume or the boot volume. Each PSM snapshot looks just like the volumes did at the time of creation and are maintained and presented on the active volume to facilitate the immediate return of individual files, groups of files, folders or complete volumes.

PSM was designed from the ground up as primary data protection, and not just to assist backup software with open and in-use file assistance. PSM provides and keeps as many snapshots as possible while using as little disk space as possible. PSM appears to operate invisibly without hurting system performance. After one snapshot is taken, PSM consumes no more performance or system resources to maintain another 1,000 snapshots.

Our unique architecture reclaims space by deleting more and more snapshots as they age and become less likely to be of value. Since PSM is designed for primary data protection, it must provide the ability to maintain snapshots for months at a time and give as many choices of snapshots as possible to restore from. The relative value of each snapshot is inversely proportional to its age, so you need fewer snapshots to choose between as they get older. However, maintaining a few of the very old snapshots becomes more valuable as they age. PSM provides as many recent snapshots as possible, while maintaining snapshots as long as possible.

PSM also provides disaster recovery of both system and data volumes. With the choice of 1,000 snapshots, PSM can “revert” each byte of the system precisely to the state at the time of the backup. So, if a virus infected every file on the system making it unbootable, PSM can revert that volume to a state before it was infected. Even if the file system itself becomes corrupt, PSM maintains the precise state of the file system, so that an unbootable corrupt file system can most often be reverted. Even when clustered systems get in trouble by copying corrupt data to an otherwise good system, PSM can revert the hardware volumes back to a pristine condition before the meltdown occurred. CDP has demonstrated this ability by recovering an Exchange server and over 30,000 users, which was put back in operation in less than an hour.

PSM is also built so that any of the volumes can be made into read/write volumes. So, if there are applications that you need to run from a snapshot, you can map that snapshot to a new volume or new folder and use it as you normally would.

The value of transient data is inversely proportional to its age. PSM is the most valuable option to protect your work automatically creating dozens of point in time snapshots from which data can be retrieved without the assistance of network administration.

PSM Features & Benefits:

• Live Primary Data Protection for servers or applications running Windows 95, 98, 98SE, ME, NT Workstation, 2000, XP, and Windows 2003.
• Instant Data Protection from persistent Snapshots
• 1,000 concurrent snapshots, 63 volumes per snapshot
• Snapshot Attributes: Read only, Read/Write, Always keep
• Automatic creation and intelligent deletion logic based on weighting system
• Transportable Snapshots: ability to migrate snapshots from one machine or hard drive to another
• Volume Support: FAT 16, FAT 32, NTFS, and soon EFS
• Direct access to snapshot data from within applications or Windows Explorer for clients using Windows 95, 98, 98SE, ME, NT Workstation, 2000, XP, and Windows 2003
• Supports automatic Microsoft cluster failover
• Disaster Recovery (add-on module)

Note: OTM is no longer provided to OEMs or users and has been superceded by PSM.

Description: Columbia Data Products’ Open Transaction Manager (OTM) enables backup software to capture perfect, coherent point-in-time backups. These may take hours to complete from servers that are constantly changing and being used for critical applications such as Exchange email servers, web servers, databases, and user application servers. OTM creates static virtual True Image™ copies of active server volumes and presents these snapshots to the backup software to act as the source of the backup. OTM maintains these snapshots during the backup with negligible impact on system and network performance and ensures the relational integrity of all files and all volumes.

History: For its time, OTM was truly revolutionary in providing much more reliable open file handling to any backup application . The “file-based” open file handles that were prevalent before the year 2000 were notoriously slow and prone to lost data on the primary volume, and sometimes corrupt backup data. OTM replaced this with its “block-based” True Image snapshots that are the only method used today.

OTM Features & Benefits:

• Assures backup and restore integrity with critical applications such as email, web-servers and transaction servers without needing to shut down the applications.
• Time stamps all files concurrently, to precisely match those from when the backup commenced.
• Eases system performance, as it acts at the disk sector level, bypassing the operating system, and CPU overhead.
• Improved backup performance–-consumes less than 4% of the CPU utilization, enabling users and vital processes to run while performing a backup.
• Protects all hidden structures that reside on the drives, such as FATs, directories, NDS, Registries, partition tables, NDP’s, sparse files, deleted unpurged files, or even hidden application copy-protected raw sector writes.
• Solves configuration induced loss issues – all files and even hidden system transactions are automatically included across the entire server, so there is no chance of data relational integrity loss due to improper configuration.
• Windows Operating Environments: Microsoft Windows NT 4.0, Windows 2000 Professional (Server and Advanced Server), Windows XP, Windows 2003 and Novell NetWare. OTM operates on both 32 and 64 bit operating systems and applications.
• NetWare Operating Environments: Novell Netware 4.x, 5.x, including NSS support, 6.x including NSS support.

PSM (Features now included in SnapBack)

• PSM Overview
• Raising the Bar on High Availability
• Death, Taxes & PSM White Paper
• PSM Datasheet
• Could this be the end of backup as we know it?

PSM SAK (Server Appliance Kit from Microsoft)

• PSM / SAK OEM Product Information
• PSM / SAK Error Codes
• PSM Frequently Asked Questions (FAQ)

OTM (Features included in PSM and SnapBack)

• Technical White Paper & Competitive Analysis