Syncsort Granted New Patent

Syncsort Incorporated announced that the United States Patent and Trademark Office has granted the company a patent for innovations in its data protection portfolio, including Instant Virtualization and Instant Data Access.

U.S. Patent No. 7,937,547, System and method for high performance enterprise data protection, was issued on May 3, 2011 and furthers Syncsort’s commitment to provide customers and channel partners with data protection solutions that can be delivered at a lower total cost of ownership.

Among the advantages the new patent discloses is the use of efficient block-level incremental snapshots of primary storage devices – and instant availability of such snapshots in immediately mountable form – directly in place of the primary storage device.

The patent also describes a mirroring technique whereby a replacement physical primary storage facility may be created while working with a second storage unit as the primary source file system, as well as a technique for eliminating redundant data in backup images when multiple systems with partially common contents are being backed up.

Syncsort’s engineering group, under the leadership of Corporate Technology Leader Dr. Peter Liu, developed the inventions disclosed in the patent in the company’s labs at its headquarters in Woodcliff Lake, N.J.

The newly-awarded patent covers Syncsort’s Instant Virtualization and Instant Data Access capabilities that have grown significantly in prominence as part of the NetApp Syncsort Integrated Backup (NSB) solution.

Instant Virtualization provides backup and instant recovery of virtual machine images, and also facilitates virtual machine migrations from physical servers. With the proliferation of virtualization, this is important for both rapid disaster recovery as well as efficient repurposing of virtual servers as resources for development and test environments.

Instant Data Access offers near-instant recovery of critical business applications without the need to transfer data. In the event of data corruption or hardware failure, this delivers value by restoring access to data and applications in minutes, instead of hours, by allowing the application to directly access a snapshot image.

According to a March 2011 Lab Validation Report from Enterprise Strategy Group, "Syncsort Instant Virtualization was able to restore an entire virtual machine and create and start it in a new ESX host in a manner of minutes. Instant Availability was used to provide read/write access to a 239 GB SQL database backup image in a little more than one minute without transferring data."

"Syncsort’s continued investment in research and development as well as the rich intellectual property we have amassed over the course of many years, enables us to provide unique value to our thousands of customers worldwide and address their most complex data challenges," said Flavio Santoni, Chief Executive Officer, Syncsort. "The innovations we are creating in our labs, such as Instant Virtualization and Instant Data Access, are invaluable to organizations that are rethinking their data protection strategies and seeking fresh approaches that are well suited technically and economically for the era of ‘Big Data’ and virtualization."