I have been using Apple’s Time Capsule for about two months, and I have to tell you that it is very good. It backs up all the Storage Switzerland servers and laptops over our network every hour like clockwork. This morning I had to recover a file from my most common “data disaster”; I opened a file I was going to use as a starting point to a new file and then saved it back with the same old file name as opposed to saving it with a new file name, effectively destroying my older copy. I can’t tell you how often I do that. Well with Time Machines / Time Capsules near flawless interface, literally 20 seconds later I had the file back.

What’s my point? We need an Enterprise Time Capsule. What would you need to create an Enterprise Time Capsule? Obviously the Apple Time Capsule is not designed for the data center. First of course you would need broader platform support than just the MAC OS/X. You would probably want to be able to integrate an off-load to tape and you’d also want application support to do online backups of databases and email.  But you would not want to give up the comfort of that hourly backup and the ability to seamlessly get to the backed up data.

The reality is that one company is pretty close to achieving and in some cases extends the solution; Syncsort with their Advance Recovery module for their Backup Express product. This module of the Backup Express solution allows for near-continuous data protection of the servers in your environment. Every hour, or based on the time interval you set, a block level incremental is performed on these servers. A block level allows for quick backups of just the changed blocks of data on a server. Only these changed blocks are sent across the network. The net effect is very little impact on the server and the network while creating a full image of your servers on the Advanced Recovery Server.

A key requirement for backup of course is versioning. The Advance Recovery server handles this nicely by taking a snapshot of itself prior to receiving the new backup data. As a result multiple instances or versions of the server being protected can be maintained. Improving on the Time Capsule model, the Advanced Recovery Server can be used directly via iSCSI. In the event of a drive failure on a protected server, it can mount the most recent backup of that volume from the Advanced Recovery server. So you get recovery without data movement.

Finally, since the Advance Recovery Server is accessible as a live volume, you can take a snapshot of a protected volume and mount that snapshot to another server as if it were actual data. By not locking data up in to a backup format you can leverage this data for purposes beyond recovery of data. For example this snapshotted volume can be used to perform tests or to run reports against.

In essence Enterprise Time Capsule is here and in fact been improved upon.