October, 2009
DataGardens Honored with People’s Choice Award
DataGardens Named Start-Up of the Year at Virtualization Congress 
DataGardens Selected as one of Canada’s Top 10™ Competition Winners
DataGardens Wins Fast Growth Award at VenturePrize Awards INTRODUCING DATAGARDENS WAVE
Overview of DataGardens WAVE™
The data center for a typical mid-sized company experiences about 87 hours of unplanned downtime per year due to major disruptive events (Gartner1). Annual loss in revenue, productivity, new business opportunities, reputation and market value is frequently in the millions of dollars. DataGardens’ next generation business continuity solution provides dramatic reductions in both planned and unplanned downtime, preventing IT system disruptions and failures, and their enormous associated costs.
DataGardens WAVE™ (Wide Area Virtualized Environment) provides a suite of business continuity services for both physical and virtual infrastructure. These services have been designed to work on low bandwidth data links that may span thousands of miles.
DataGardens WAVE™ revolutionary business continuity solutions include:
- Live VM Migration between sites using low bandwidth interconnects with automatic IP readdressing and redirection of clients when VMs migrate between subnets.
- Live Rollback of servers and data volumes with active processes still running as they were at the selected instant in the selected site.
- Fail-Over of groups of VMs and data volumes to a remote site.
- Fail-Back of VMs and data volumes together with their active processes to the original production site after a disruption event is resolved: only incremental changes and corrupted data blocks transmit between sites.
How is DataGardens WAVE™ Different?
DataGardens WAVE™ has a unique architecture, embedding computational resources such as physical data volumes, virtual machines and virtual network appliances in structures called “Distributed Virtual Resources” (DVRs). Each DVR is constructed from a pair of replicas spanning two sites: one replica is active while the other is kept hidden in a suspended state. The DVR automatically captures disk and memory changes from the active replica, transmits them to the remote location, and patches them into the hidden replica, as illustrated below.
Unlike many business continuity solutions, which are designed to redress only major disasters, the DataGardens WAVE™ provides a full suite of protection services that help reduce downtime regardless of the cause or scope of the disruption.
- DataGardens solutions focus on disaster avoidance, rather than recovery.
- Less than one third the cost of competing solutions and avoids most administrative costs associated with conventional solutions.
- Easy to use and can be managed by typical IT administrators without specialized training as dedicated disaster recovery professionals.
DataGardens WAVE™ does not force users to confine normal production activity to a single site while using another site strictly for disaster protection. Rather, DataGardens WAVE™ scales to three or more sites and allows dynamic sharing of workload between sites that provide mutual protection. DataGardens WAVE™ does not require a SAN or a third party storage replication appliance in any site.
Most importantly, DataGardens WAVE™ protects not only computational infrastructure, but active IT processes and services. As a business continuity solution, the value of DataGardens WAVE™ is measured by its impact on IT downtime – not just for disasters, but for all forms of service disruption.
With DataGardens WAVE™, an administrator can avoid service disruption due to many planned and unplanned events that would normally result in significant downtime, such as routine maintenance, backup, hardware upgrade, human error, software failure, network outage, and fire. Even in cases of precipitous failure or data corruption, DataGardens WAVE™ offers three different service levels for recovery: crash consistency, application consistency, and active-state consistency.
When evaluating a business continuity system, it is important to remember that often some of the greatest sources of downtime relate not to the recovery system itself, but to the complex human decision making processes surrounding detecting failure, diagnosing its causes, and ascertaining a preferred recovery strategy. DataGardens WAVE™ facilitates these decision making processes by providing automatic detection, classification, and wireless notification of many failure conditions.