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.