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What is AppAssure?
In my travels as a network engineer I often hear the question, “What is AppAssure?” The simple answer is that AppAssure is a comprehensive backup solution, but that is only telling half the story.
When installed with a replication partner AppAssure is a very robust system for backup, replication and disaster recovery. Here’s how it works.
AppAssure is a software solution which runs on top of a Windows Server host. The software may be purchased as either a stand-alone product or as a pre-installed rack-mount name brand appliance. In either configuration this central server is known as a “Core”. The core acts as the onsite repository of all backed up data.
Like a traditional backup solution, the AppAssure core communicates to each protected server via a lightweight agent. Following an initial “base” or “seed” of the server the agent monitors changes on the server between each backup. This backup is known as a snapshot. The cadence on this snapshot process is infinitely variable with a minimum value of 5 minutes. At each snapshot interval the agent aggregates all the changed blocks on the server, and following de-duplication and compression, they are written to the core.
Unlike many disk-based solutions the AppAssure agent and process is very lightweight and has trivial impact on the target server.
In a follow up blog post I will cover AppAssure’s restore and “Live Recovery” features.