By Tay Kratzer

Reload is a Backup, Quick Restore and Quick Disaster Recovery solution.
Reload is designed to meet many of the challenges faced today by GroupWise administrators when dealing with Backups.

Reload is a backup solution that provides:

• Faster backups
• Two-minute access to backed-up data
• A full disaster recovery solution for your GroupWise post offices
• A truly GroupWise centric approach to backing up GroupWise post offices

If a customer already has a backup solution, and most do, it most likely is a very painful subject because actually restoring data is VERY slow and time-consuming.

Reload as a Backup, Quick Restore and Disaster Recovery Solution

Most customers want all three solutions provided with Reload, and the fact that they can have all three solutions in one has been making Reload a slam-dunk solution. Most people have a backup solution for GroupWise, but their current backup system most likely has the following problems and limitations:

• Restoring data takes a long time; anywhere from several hours, to a few days.
• It's unreliable, and it's difficult to test whether or not the backup is a good backup.
• It's not GroupWise centric, and does not backup data that is either deleted or archived before the GroupWise post office is backed up again.
• Backup times are slow.
• Their backup system can in no way actually be used as a disaster recovery solution.

That's where Reload comes in. Here's Reload's list of features, many of which are unique to Reload versus competing solutions:

• Accessing a Reload Backup can be done in a matter of two minutes.
• Each Reload backup is effectively a full backup, with only 12% of the total size of the post office being replicated and stored in order to represent each backup.
• With Reload, intra-day e-mail that is received and deleted in the same day is no longer a black hole, it's backed up with Reload.
• With Reload, when a user archives an item, a copy of the archived item is retained in the GroupWise message store until it is backed up with Reload. So once again, the fact that data is archived does not mean it goes into a black hole. This is important for legal discovery purposes.
• Reload enhances tape backups in that when Reload presents a full backup set to be saved to tape, only one large *.tar file which contains 7 days of e-mail needs to be backed up. This greatly speeds up backup or restoration of data from tape if ever you should need to go to tape.
• Reload backups are significantly faster than most backup solutions. For example the State of Utah Governor's office used to use Veritas hooked into the GroupWise TSA to perform backups. The backup time each night was about 4 ½ hours. With Reload, nightly backups take about 35 minutes.
• Reload is a full disaster-recovery solution for a GroupWise post office. Furthermore, with Reload it's easy to design on off-site disaster recovery solution. I mean really easy! This is a huge development for customers who have off-site data centers, or branch offices where they want to replicate their GroupWise post offices to in case of disasters that actually take out the data center at a certain site.
• Data in the Reload backup cannot be purged. It's there for good. So actually archiving something out of the Reload backup for example, does not remove it from the GroupWise message store on the Reload server.
• Accessing Reload data is as easy as pointing any GroupWise client to the Reload server. No special access rights need to be assigned, no special client plug-ins need to be installed, etc. There's nothing for users to install, and nothing new for them to learn. Nice!
• Reload data is all kept in the native GroupWise message store format, and so it's not altered in any way, and still secure and familiar to GroupWise administrators and users.
• No Reload-related software needs to run on the servers that are housing your GroupWise post offices.
• Reload is very supportable. I'm a support guy, and I wrote it to be very supportable. Installing Reload is one command. All logs are kept in a *.zip file that gets updated every 5 minutes and is exportable from the Reload server's web page. The Reload server software is very easy to maintain, upgrades are simple, and can even be automated.
• A lot of little features, and flexibility, such as the "Reload Mobile" feature that allows an administrator to make a Reload backup accessible, without the need to be sitting at a workstation. They can use their BlackBerry, or any other device has an SSH client. I was just talking with a customer yesterday who raved about this feature.

GroupWise Customers Who Do Not Want Any Backup Solution for GroupWise

There is actually a certain sub-set of customers that do not want to have backups of their GroupWise system. One of the advantages to this approach is that they cannot be required to go back to backed up data from say . . . a year ago, with all of the effort and long-term storage expense involved in doing so.

One might think that Reload has no chance in an organization such as this, but quite the contrary is true. Reload can be designed to just keep the data around hot and live for two weeks, for example. This data does not need to be backed up to tape if the customer so chooses. With this design, the customer can still have all the advantages of not having to store and restore data for long into the past. In reality, outside of historical legal discovery, most people need backed-up data from the near term. In fact, 25% of the time they need data from last night's backup. And the other 75% of the time they need data from within the last two or three weeks.

So with Reload in place the customer still has near-term backups, without the need to retain long-term backups. Furthermore, by having Reload in place the customer has a disaster recovery solution to boot.

Archiving Solutions

Back to the discussion on Backup and Archiving solutions. Generally Reload is not a competitor to the various different archiving solutions for GroupWise. However there is a certain sub-set of customers shopping around for archive solutions, because their backup solution is so unusable. I would estimate that 30% of the customers currently shopping around for an archive solution actually just need a decent backup/restore and discovery solution. These customers need to hear about the Reload/Reveal combination. And again to boot, the customer gets a rock-solid disaster-recovery solution. The other 70% of the customers that truly need to be shopping around for an archive solution for GroupWise still need to hear about Reload, because of its merits as a backup, restore and disaster recovery solution.

In actuality, only a certain sub-set of GroupWise customers need an archive solution. I would tag it at somewhere around 25% of the GroupWise market at most. Here's why:

In a nutshell, most customers that really do need an archive solution need the solution for legal discovery and compliance reasons. Legal compliance is often needed for up to 7 years. Once a vendor gets you on their archive solution, they have you on the hook for up to 7 years. That's an extremely attractive carrot for archive vendors. And for the big software companies, they are looking at the relationship in an even bigger way. If they can get you to put your GroupWise communications into their system, and you like their solution for GroupWise, you are likely to use their other data-warehousing solutions for other kinds of data.

You might think, if I jump ship from VENDOR A to VENDOR B, then I can certainly migrate the data. Don't bet on it! See when something is in GroupWise format, it's actually in a format that, albeit proprietary to Novell, is accessible through the GroupWise client, and through APIs. But once you've migrated data out of GroupWise to an archive solution, don't bet you can migrate that data to a different solution. I'm not trying to say don't go with an archive solution; just make sure you do your homework first, because it's a long-term relationship.

Understanding the "Archive" feature in Reload

Part of the reason salespeople think that Reload could be considered an "archive" solution is because there is a feature in Reload called "Archive". Let me explain, in the form of the customer request that caused me to add this feature to Reload.

A county government in the United States, in the state of Florida has some "Sunshine Laws" that require information to be around for public scrutiny, if needed. For this county government, they determined that they needed to keep all electronic communication for 5 years (if I remember correctly). It wasn't just GroupWise data, we're talking everything that would be considered electronic communication. As a result, they installed a NAS device to which they can just keep adding disk space. They asked that we design Reload so that after three weeks for example, they could just have Reload move the data to the NAS. At this point they would rarely if ever need to go back to a backup in order to get data, because as we already established, most customers need to restore data from the near-term. But by having Reload moving data to the NAS, they had a way to be compliant with the "Sunshine Laws". Sunshine Laws do not require that all data be easily searchable at the snap of someone's fingers, and simply having the backed-up data hot and live on a disk was more than enough for this customer to comply with the Sunshine Laws.

Summary

• Reload is a Backup, Quick Restore, and Quick Disaster Recovery solution for GroupWise post offices.
• All customers need a Backup system, and other existing Backup systems are slow, or lacking many of the features in Reload.
• Of the sub-set of customers currently shopping around for an archive solution, probably 30% of them are actually doing so because their backup system is so unusable.
• 70% of the customers shopping around for an archive solution truly need an archive solution from another vendor. However, all customers (who don't have Reload) need a better Backup/Restore and Disaster Recovery solution.