During our 35+ years experience in the ICT area we came across various situations where we were asked to help with restoring business functionalities after a disaster happened. In quite a few cases we discovered that, even though backups were available, the data in the backups was not useable due to data integrity issues. About 8,5 years ago, just after one of these cases where a customer lost several months of mail data the seed was planted. Not being able to use successful backups to restore datasets was degrading the whole principle behind making backups in the first place. We thought we had to come up with something to remediate this issue. Convincing the backup industry they had to change the way how backups are made was not really an option, so we started talking with some industry experts about our idea. The common reaction was "what you want to do is not possible". Lucky for us we didn't know that and decided to do a small proof-of-concept to see if the basic idea would work.
The prototype was very basic, looked awful and required a lot of external scripts to function. From a distance the set up looked like a plate of Italian spaghetti. Running in a user session, using a single thread, BUT it worked! A test round took ages to complete as it only did one thing at the time. Checking a few large mailstores took almost 4 days to complete and the results had to be interpreted manually. During a meeting with Ash Asutosh (Founder of Actifio, now part of Google) I explained the idea and showed the prototype. His reactions proved us that our idea was worth the investment in time and money. During our development we spoke with Ash (and his team) on many occasions and we are still very thankful for the time and support.
Having a prototype is one thing. Going from that towards a full blown enterprise grade solution is something else. The solution had to be fast, reliable, secure, work as advertised, and scale with the always growing amount of backup data. We continued to talk with geniuses from the backup and storage industry from companies like Rubrik, CommVault, Veaam, ArcServe, NetApp, HPE, IBM and many more. It gave us the insights and made clear were their customers struggled most regarding backup validation and restore issues. Fast forwarding to 2022, we are finally ready to enable all those businesses to implement our solution. It is a one of a kind solution, as at this moment there is still nothing on the market that does what we do. Today restAssured is an enterprise grade scalable multi-tier solution that can analyze Petabytes of backup data a day. The analytics engine we developed to validate the test results is growing day by day and currently has a ruleset of 130K+ validation checks. Backups of multiple backup backends can be simultaneously tested and reported on. We are proud of the result and happy and grateful that this phase is completed.
We are Rene, Monique and Mark. Rene has been involved as a subject matter expert in large storage, backup and DR projects around the world for more than 35 years. He acted in the role of lead technical architect for companies like HPE, IBM, KPMG International, European Patent Office and many others. Mark has been involved in ICT for over 20 years bringing an unprecedented amount of experience in the quality assurance area. He started his career at Electronic Arts where he was involved in testing new software releases. He also worked for many years for large insurance companies were he helped testing the functionality and quality of new company wide software implementations. Monique has a broad experience as an entrepreneur in various business areas. Besides that she is one of the smartest people I know and questions all development decisions made with valuable arguments. She makes sure restAssured grows the way pretended and keeps everybody focused on what we want to achieve.
Business Generating Software B.V is a software and services company who delivers state of the art enterprise software solutions. Our focus is around monitoring software which extends standard solutions like Microsoft’s SCOM and Microfocus Operations Manager to databases, virtualization platforms and VDI implementations. We are a channel development partner for startups and enterprise software products. restAssured is a promising solution for extending the quality of backup and restore environments which need to be managed professionally.
Another area we focus on is the legendary OpenVMS operating system. After HPE stopped supporting and developing this OS a new company stood up to deliver new versions of OpenVMS. VMS Software Inc. (VSI) is the new developer of OpenVMS and a new version for X86 is to be released in 2022.
Automated backup integrity testing for the enterprise
info@restassured.nl
+31 6 23637122
