DL1300 Appliance
Replication — disaster recovery site or service provider
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Server 2012 R2 Foundation and Standard operating systems. The appliance performs target-based inline
compression, encryption, and data deduplication of the data received from the agent. The Core then stores the
snapshot backups in the repository, which resides on the appliance. Cores are paired for replication.
The repository resides on internal storage within the Core. The Core is managed by accessing the following URL
from a JavaScript enabled web browser: https://CORENAME:8006/apprecovery/admin.
Parent topic
Quest DL1300 Smart Agent
The Smart Agent is installed on the core-protected machine. The Smart Agent tracks the changed blocks on
the disk volume and then snaps an image of the changed blocks at a predefined interval of protection. The
incremental block-level snapshots’ forever approach prevents repeated copying of the same data from the
protected machine to the Core.
After the agent is configured, it uses smart technology to track the changed blocks on the protected disk volumes.
When the snapshot is ready, it is rapidly transferred to the Core using intelligent multi-threaded, socket-based
connections.
Parent topic
Snapshot process
Your DL1300 protection process begins when a base image is transferred from a protected machine to the Core.
In this phase, full copy of the machine is transported across the network under normal operation, followed by
incremental snapshots forever. The DL1300 Agent for Windows uses Microsoft Volume Shadow copy Service
(VSS) to freeze and quiesce application data to disk to capture a file-system-consistent and an application-
consistent backup. When a snapshot is created, the VSS writer on the target server prevents content from being
written to the disk. During the process of halting of writing content to disk, all disk I/O operations are queued
and resume only after the snapshot is complete, while the operations in progress will be completed and all open
files will be closed. The process of creating a shadow copy does not significantly affect the performance of the
production system.
Your DL1300 uses Microsoft VSS because it has built-in support for all Windows internal technologies such
as NTFS, Registry, Active Directory, to flush data to disk before the snapshot. Additionally, other enterprise
applications, such as Microsoft Exchange and SQL, use VSS Writer plug-ins to get notified when a snapshot
is being prepared and when they have to flush their used database pages to disk to bring the database to a
consistent transactional state. The captured data is rapidly transferred and stored on the Core.
Parent topic
Replication — disaster recovery site or service
provider
Replication is the process of copying recovery points from an AppAssure core and transmitting them to another
AppAssure core in a separate location for disaster recovery. The process requires a paired source-target
relationship between two or more cores.
The source core copies the recovery points of selected protected machines, and then asynchronously and
continually transmits the incremental snapshot data to the target core at a remote disaster recovery site. You
can configure outbound replication to a company-owned data center or remote disaster recovery site (that is, a
“self-managed” target core). Or, you can configure outbound replication to a third-party managed service provider
(MSP) or cloud provider that hosts off-site backup and disaster recovery services. When replicating to a third-
party target core, you can use built-in work flows that let you request connections and receive automatic feedback
notifications.
