News

NuView Aims to Speed File Restores

• By Stuart J. Johnston
• September 14, 2005

NuView will ship in the next month a new product aimed at providing fast, on-demand file restoration following a failure or for routine maintenance.

Data on Demand Manager (DDM) is designed to enable IT staffers to get a downed server back up and running and restore users’ access to files more quickly than conventional means. In a conventional scenario, the entire server needs to be restored before users have access to their files again.

However, after a primary server fails, DDM initially restores what NuView calls “mini-files – stub files containing only the meta data that describe the files. “The stub files contain everything about the file minus the content,” says a NuView spokeswoman. After recovering a failed primary server, when users try to access their files, Data on Demand Manager finds the complete files on the secondary – backup – server and restores them onto the recovered primary server, she adds.

DDM can be used in two ways – either on demand or for scheduled restore operations. The company claims DDM will reduce restore times to minutes rather than hours or days.

NuView’s Data on Demand Manager is currently in beta and scheduled to ship in the next 30 days. It will cost $10,000 per primary server.