RecoverGuard is born

The calendar shows early 2005... once we figured out what we wanted to do, the next thing was to design a product that could achieve it. We envisioned a software that would work like a system management solution (HP's OpenView, IBM's Tivoli, and the likes) with an anti-virus capabilities. One that could constantly scan through an entire IT / DR infrastructure and "monitor" it to ensure that no vulnerabilities are evolving (or already existed) in the infrastructure, and verify that the data protection status is valid and meets the business goals.

Our primary focus was on critical business services, ones with an aggressive RPO and RTO which dictates a dedicated mirrored data center. These DR systems are usually based on storage replications (most of them are synchronous replications) and can not afford to have configuration issues or limited DR availability. Their data protection and disaster recovery must work at any point of time, regardless of the IT configuration changes or any failures of the infrastructure.

So we designed a system that could periodically retrieve information from the storage assets, databases, servers and replications, together with the configuration and status of the various infrastructure assets. We designed it in such a way that its deployment would be simple enough (agents? no agents. We all think we have passed the number of agents allowed into the data center) that it could efficiently go through large amount of data and scan large infrastructures that span across multiple data centers or geographic locations.

The next design challenge was to create the ability to "understand" the relationship between various IT assets - servers to storage, database to storage, replications to all of these, and many other relationships that exist in a "typical" data center. In addition, we wanted the ability to quickly look for "patterns" of vulnerabilities based on the information we collected, and off course alert the ability to inform the system operator of their existence. To our engineering minds it all sounded so much like an anti-virus - signatures, scan engine, detecting viruses (vulnerabilities).... add the fact that some of our engineers actually designed anti-virus products in their past, and you get a good understanding of what needs to be done.

Design was complete. Let the coding begin......