Calsoft Announced Windows Volume Change Block Tracking Solution

In today’ rapidly changing and competitive market, a quick go-to-market strategy is key to the success of any product. With the fast growing virtualization and cloud environments, offering a cloud DR solution that spans ubiquitously from desktops to servers and from physical to virtualized deployments running complex application stacks requires complex technology which can take months to build and perfect.

To this end, Calsoft, Inc. has announced the launch of its ready to integrate Change Block Tracking (CBT) solution – CSCBT (Calsoft’s Change Block Tracking) – that can reduce time-to-market for companies offering a cloud DR solution. This ready made solution, which is tested and qualified for the Windows environment, can reduce engineering OPEX for building the cloud DR solution.

The CSCBT software has been built natively on Windows and supports nearly twenty flavors of Windows OS ranging from Windows Vista to Windows 2016 and their editions. It’s well-defined public interface to start, stop, get, delete the tracking of Windows volumes, a silent installer for packaging and a pre tested memory and performance footprint fulfill all the requirements for a BC/DR product to quickly ‘productize’ their offering, thereby reducing the go-to-market time. It also supports unlimited multiple, concurrent change tracking of the same volume, each independently optimized to reduce system memory footage while supporting dynamic volume expansion and shrinkage.

Key features of CSCBT include:

• Compatible with all Windows compatible local and SAN storage over iSCSI and FC as well as USB storage

• Handles volumes that expand or shrink dynamically

• Error handling, where all API calls made by the driver are checked for failure, and any failure events are logged as Windows event logs in a way that can be detected

• Multithread-safe and can safely handle any level of I/O concurrency

• Does not require system reboot to enable tracking of volumes that appear after installation

• Support for volumes that show up or are plugged after driver load

• DLL written in C/C++ having less than 10 APIs with support for multithreading

• Easy to integrate with applications with a ready sample application to expedite integration effort

• Support for VSS snapshot IOs

• Optimum memory consumption with finer control

• Easily extensible for adding customer specific functionality

• DriverVerifier compliant

• New features and enhancements provided as a part of periodic patch releases

• All releases are tested and WHQL/WHLC qualified, ready to be certified

Benefits of using off-the-shelf IP:

• Time savings: Designing and developing a customized tool takes a lot of time. By using off-the-shelf IP, companies can save time and reduce time to market.

• Cost savings: The cost of developing a customized product is directly proportional to the time taken for development. Along with the core development cost there are several other peripheral costs associated with developing the product. Using off-the-shelf products directly eliminates all these costs.

• Availability: One of the biggest advantages of using off-the-shelf IPs is that you can start using them right from day one. This is a time saver.

• Flexibility: Off-the-shelf items give the flexibility of making changes or revisions based on business requirement, without changing the core product.